smallholder schemes will not survive Irrigation Management Transfer (IMT) as it is currently envisioned. For IMT to be successful in the African smallholder context, governments must first enhance the income-creation potential of smallholder irrigated farming by strengthening market access, promoting high-value crops and improving extension and technical support to smallholder irrigators. This ...

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...

Smallholder farming systems form unique ecosystems that can protect beneficial soil biota and form an important source of useful genetic resources. They are characterized by high level of agricultural diversity mainly focused on meeting farmers' needs. Unfortunately, these systems often experience poor crop production mainly associated with poor planning and resource scarcity. Soil fertility is...

Editorial PrEfacE The growing use of new generation, mobile-based, information and communication technologies (ICT) has expanded opportunities for food and agricultural marketing and rural financial service delivery among the smallholder farming community in Sub-Saharan Africa. Smallholder farmers in developing countries have struggled for many years under difficult conditions of poor access to...

This study was undertaken to investigate the impact of microfinance on agricultural productivity by smallholder farmers in Makurdi Metropolis of Benue State, Nigeria. Data were randomly collected from 120 farmers consisting of 60 credit beneficiaries (CB) and 60 non-credit beneficiaries (NCB) by which were analyzed through descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis. The results of ...

The study investigated the effect of Community-Based Paid Extension (CPE) on vulnerability reduction of smallholder dairy farmers. Randomly sampled 255 farmers were interviewed together with 15 key informants’ interview. Both statistical analysis and thematic approach were employed to achieve triangulation. In about 68 % of cases, CPE reduced vulnerability to a degree experienced as ‘moderate’,...

— It is widely agreed that smallholder-led agricultural growth would contribute most to improved food security and reduced poverty. Yet, how to achieve broader and more sustainable access by smallholder farmers to productivity-enhancing inputs for food crop production remains a largely unsolved riddle. In light of the great institutional diversity across cotton sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, th...

Livestock kept or produced in smallholder farming systems are an important component of the agricultural economy in the developing world. The role of livestock on smallholder farms varies widely, providing draught power for crop production or as a production activity for subsistence needs or market sale under systems ranging from extensive pastoralist to intensive, peri-urban feeder and dairy s...

IFAD's comparative advantage lies in its experience in working at the grass-roots level, its understanding of the constraints facing rural poor people, including the most vulnerable, and its capacity to envisage inclusive approaches for socio-economic development. A key element of IFAD’s approach to development is providing support to rural smallholder organizations as a strategy for empowering...

This article examines an ICT-based intervention (known as the DrumNet project) that has succeeded in integrating smallholder-resource and poor farmers into a higher value agricultural chain. The article assesses the design of the project, and how it resolves the smallholder farmers’ idiosyncratic market failures and examines member-farmers’ marketing margins. The article finds that the design o...