All Articles

This study uses an online laboratory experiment and a post-experimental survey to test whether the Mastercard Foundation (MCF) scholarship programme causally influences the creation of cognitive social capital among University of Pretoria recipients.

This paper analyses the heterogeneous effects of membership of a farmer group on access to water, use of inorganic fertiliser, household incomes, and farm asset holdings. A sample of 401 irrigators in South Africa was analysed using propensity score matching. The study found that group membership had a positive effect on all four outcomes.

This study investigates how public agricultural expenditure can mitigate the effect of climate variability on banks’ agricultural credit supply in sub-Saharan Africa.

In this study, we investigate whether land tenure security is a pull factor for household income diversification.

The literature on what drives crop failure and crop abandonment is scant. This paper explores the interplay between risk factors and crop abandonment. We examine the role of risk sources and risk management strategies in crop abandonment by smallholder maize farmers in Zambia.

Soybean is one of the key legume crops that provides several financial benefits for farming households in Malawi. However, Malawi's persisting efforts to improve smallholder productivity and diversification have only translated into moderate improvements in food security outcomes.

One of the three components of Rwanda’s flagship anti-poverty programme, Vision 2020 Umurenge (VUP), is the provision of credit to relatively poor households, nearly all of them farmers. In this paper we estimate the impact of the programme using high-quality household survey data from 2013/2014 and 2016/2017.

Cette étude vise à analyser les dispositions à acheter et le consentement à payer le riz local par les femmes au Burkina Faso. Les préférences des consommatrices et leurs consentements à payer le riz local de Bagré ont été révélés à partir des enchères expérimentales conduites auprès de 120 femmes de la ville de Ouagadougou.

The conditions in which increased market participation leads to improved technical efficiency are still not adequately understood. This study therefore investigated farmers’ market participation rates and their predicted technical efficiency scores by performing a two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression analysis using household-level data obtained from the 2009 Ethiopian rural household survey.

Goat keeping is a common practice among rural farmers due to the adaptability of goats to harsh environments, their efficient forage conversion and rapid growth, and their multiple benefits, including the production of manure and high-quality milk.

The study employed the Phillips and Sul log-t convergence test to analyse the degree of convergence for the Niger Basin region (NBR) countries in terms of per capita carbon emission and food availability.

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is known for its efficiency in converting resources into high-quality food, which can aid in poverty reduction. However, the potato yield in Rwanda has been declining, leading to farmer dissatisfaction with trading terms and a reliance on low prices in the value chain.

This study examines how climate variability affects agricultural productivity and economic growth in Nigeria using time-series data from 1960 to 2024.

This study analysed the long- and short-run effect of economic policy uncertainty on agricultural growth in Nigeria. Annual data was collected from secondary sources and analysed using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and the associated bounds test.

This study analyses the trade-offs between welfare (measured by income) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions using a farm-level optimisation model that incorporates the predominant cereal (sorghum), legumes (groundnut, soybeans), livestock (cattle, goats and sheep) and trees (locust bean, camel’s foot) representative of production systems at two contrasting sites in northern Nigeria.

Smallholder rural farmers are exposed to diverse idiosyncratic and covariate shocks that lead to high income and consumption volatility. Formal cash management tools, which are important for managing risk and volatility, often break down due to high information asymmetries and the transaction costs of operating in rural areas.

This study applied the zero-inefficiency stochastic frontier (ZISF) to analyse the technical efficiency of 333 improved rice-farming households for the 2012/2013 farming season in Ghana.

Very few studies of the agricultural sector’s adaptation to climate change have been conducted in Benin. This paper focuses on farmers’ perceptions and adaptation decisions in relation to climate change.

This study examined the effect of sustainable intensification (SI) technologies, specifically the use of improved maize seed varieties, of improved bean seed varieties (Nua45), crop rotation, maize-legume intercropping and doubled-up legume systems on farm income in Dedza district, Malawi.

This study applied stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) to examine the technical efficiency of maize production in northern Ghana using cross-sectional data from 360 maize farmers for the 2011/2012 cropping season.

This study empirically investigates the effect of the productive safety net programme (PSNP) on household food consumption and dietary diversity in Ethiopia. The study applied random effects with instrumental variables to estimate the effect of PSNP membership.

We measured the producer price impacts of food and cash transfer programmes in Ethiopia using monthly panel data from 37 zones in four major regions over the period January 2007 to December 2010.

This article examines the current state of food safety preparedness and response in three representative countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA): Kenya, Senegal and South Africa. We focus on foodborne diseases associated with the microbial contamination of animal-sourced foods.

This study investigates the driving factors that influence farmers’ decisions to adopt modern agricultural inputs (MAI) and how this affects farm household welfare in rural Rwanda. To account for heterogeneity in the MAI adoption decision and unobservable farm and household attributes, we estimate an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model.