In the Savannah region of West Africa, the highly variable rainfall and poor soils have been shown to di€erentially a€ect the yield potential of various crops. The paper applies a simple risk programming model to assess the e€ects of price and yield risk on the incomes of smallholder farmers in northern region of Coà te d'Ivoire. The analysis showed that by considering price and yield risks, it...

This paper suggests that a new approach is required to link smallholders with agribusiness in developing countries. This approach combines the use of the new institutional economics, a case study methodology and the lessons of history, to develop some suggestions for the design of a viable and sustainable contract farming model. A case study methodology in the Southern African sugar industry is...

Farming as a livelihood activity in the Bosomtwe District is threatened by climate change. This paper ascertained the alternative livelihood options of smallholder farmers against climate variability and change in the Bosomtwe District. Using a cross-sectional survey, 152 smallholder farmers were sampled from 12 communities using a multistage sampling procedure. The quantitative data collected ...

One of the major aims of the Structural Adjustment Programs, except from correcting short-term imbalances in the economy and creating an environment for sustained economic growth has been, according to the World Bank, to correct the urban-bias politics in Africa. The World Bank uses neo-classic economic models in their analysis of the characteristic of the urban-bias as well as its outcomes. Ac...

Lack of agricultural information has been attributed to the inability of smallholder farmers to transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Recent efforts to improve smallholder access to agricultural information have seen increased application of ICT technologies in developing agriculture. These efforts use ICT-based market information to reduce transaction costs of smallholder part...

Distributed irrigation systems are those in which the water access (via pump or human power), distribution (via furrow, watering can, sprinkler, drip lines, etc.), and use all occur at or near the same location. Distributed systems are typically privately owned and managed by individuals or groups, in contrast to centralized irrigation systems, which tend to be publicly operated and involve lar...

1 This article demonstrates how Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) impacts on collective marketing among smallholder farmers of southern Africa through increased crop productivity, yields and income. We use a quasi-experimental design to compare outcomes under IAR4D and under two other states namely conventional approach and non-intervention. The study relies on primary da...

The determinants of the technical efficiency (TE) of adopters and non-adopters of soil and water conservation (SWC) technologies in the upper Rwizi micro-catchment of south-western Uganda are compared using cross-sectional survey data from 246 smallholder farmers. A Cobb-Douglas stochastic production frontier and a probit selection model fitted to generate inverse Mills ratios for adopters and ...

This paper investigates the relationship between food security and commercialisation using data from a household survey in National Smallholder Farmer Association of Malawi (NASFAM) operated areas. NASFAM promotes commercialisation of agriculture by introducing the principle of farming as a business among its members who are largely smallholder subsistence farmers. The study finds that househol...

Description: Support to smallholder irrigation agriculture by virtue of establishing smalland medium-scale irrigation perimeters along the Eastern and South-Eastern slopes of Mt Kenya. In the first two phases (phase III ongoing, phase IV under preparation) approx. 2,700 smallholder farmers benefited from the establishment of 1,785 hectares of newly irrigated land (6 perimeters with altogether 4...