Agriculture plays a dominant role in the economies of sub-Saharan African countries though productivity has historically lagged behind other regions. In the past two decades, agriculture has been re-prioritized in policy and governments are increasingly mobilizing funding from diverse sources to finance agricultural development projects.
This is part two in a two-part series on categorizing small-scale producers. In the last post, we looked at the fact that the majority of the literature does not offer a definition of small-scale producer, and the diversity of definitions provided by the few articles which do. In this post, we look at three collections of tools that EPAR has developed to determine the consequences of choosing particular criteria and thresholds for definitions of small-scale producer
The idea of working with small-scale producers, also known as small-scale farmers, is ubiquitous in the development literature, so much so that the term made it into SDG target 2.3: “By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers…” However, an exact definition of what is meant by a small-scale producer remains elusive.