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In this report we analyze three waves nationally-representative household survey data from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia to explore sociodemographic and economic factors associated with mobile money adoption, awareness, and use across countries and over time. Our findings indicate that to realize the potential of digital financial services to reach currently unbanked populations and increase financial inclusion, particular attention needs to be paid to barriers faced by women in accessing mobile money. While policies and interventions to promote education, employment, phone ownership, and having a bank account may broadly help to increase mobile money adoption and use, potentially bringing in currently unbanked populations, specific policies targeting women may be needed to close current gender gaps.
According to AGRA's 2017 Africa Agriculture Status Report, smallholder farmers make up to about 70% of the population in Africa. The report finds that 500 million smallholder farms around the world provide livelihoods for more than 2 billion people and produce about 80% of the food in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Many development interventions and policies therefore target smallholder farm households with the goals of increasing their productivity and promoting agricultural transformation. Of particular interest for agricultural transformation is the degree to which smallholder farm households are commercializating their agricultural outputs, and diversifying their income sources away from agriculture. In this project, EPAR uses data from the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) to analyze and compare characteristics of smallholder farm households at different levels of crop commercialization and reliance on farm income, and to evaluate implications of using different criteria for defining "smallholder" households for conclusions on trends in agricultural transformation for those households.
An ongoing stream of EPAR research considers how public good characteristics of different types of research and development (R&D) and the motivations of different providers of R&D funding affect the relative advantages of alternative funding sources. For this project, we seek to summarize the key public good characteristics of R&D investment for agriculture in general and for different subsets of crops, and hypothesize how these characteristics might be expected to affect public, private, or philanthropic funders’ investment decisions.
By examining how farmers respond to changes in crop yield, we provide evidence on how farmers are likely to respond to a yield-enhancing intervention that targets a single staple crop such as maize. Two alternate hypotheses we examine are: as yields increase, do farmers maintain output levels but change the output mix to switch into other crops or activities, or do they hold cultivated area constant to increase their total production quantity and therefore their own consumption or marketing of the crop? This exploratory data analysis using three waves of panel data from Tanzania is part of a long-term project examining the pathways between staple crop yield (a proxy for agricultural productivity) and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa.
EPAR’s Political Economy of Fertilizer Policy series provides a history of government intervention in the fertilizer markets of eight Sub-Saharan African countries: Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania. The briefs focus on details of present and past voucher programs, input subsidies, tariffs in the fertilizer sector, and the political context of these policies. The briefs illustrate these policies’ effect on key domestic crops and focus on the strengths and weaknesses of current market structure. Fertilizer policy in SSA has been extremely dynamic over the last fifty years, swinging from enormous levels of intervention in the 1960s and 70s to liberalization of markets of the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, intervention has become more moderate, focusing on “market smart” subsidies and support. This executive summary highlights key findings and common themes from the series.
This report presents data on selected agricultural commodities for the second and third quarter of 2009 (April-September 2009) and the month of October, where available. More specifically, this report provides a summary of recent changes and trends in agricultural commodities markets. This summary is followed by an analysis of prices, demand, supply, and market conditions for key agricultural commodities. We find that agricultural commodity prices in 2009 have thus far decreased significantly from 2008 peak levels. While agricultural commodity prices remain subdued, the prices of some commodities including cocoa, coffee and maize have risen recently. An addendum to the Quarterly Commodity Price Update from April-October 2009 presents an overview of price data and recent trends in cotton, dairy, and international wheat commodity markets. Speculators note that fluctuations in the U.S. dollar, growing world demand, and uncertainty over the pace of global economic recovery have influenced agricultural commodities.
On July 10, 2009 at the Italy G8 summit, attendees issued a joint statement pledging to contribute $20 billion towards agricultural development and food security in the developing world over the next three years. This research brief notes the status of the contributions made to the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative and whether any of the $20 billion will be allocated to agricultural research. We conclude that no declarations have been made as of September 2009 on how much of the $20 billion will be allocated to agricultural research, and which types of research will be funded by the initiative.
Nigeria’s experience with fertilizer subsidy programs has been different than that of other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria is one of the only African countries capable of producing fertilizer domestically. But Nigeria is also large and densely populated. This makes national agricultural policy difficult due to logistical problems with implementation and the unique fertilizer needs of the various agro-ecological zones. This research brief discusses the effects of Nigeria’s input subsidy programs on maize production and fertilizer consumption. It focuses on the years 2000 to 2007, but also includes a discussion of Nigeria’s subsidy history from the early 1970s to 2009. Researchers have had difficulty studying Nigeria’s subsidy schemes due to a lack of data. In spite of decades of authoritarian, centralized leadership, Nigeria’s states have significant power to implement their own subsidies. This complicates any evaluation of a program’s effectiveness, in part due to the variety of subsidies at any given time, as well as inconsistent accounting practices.
Yam is a major staple in West and Central Africa and an important supplementary food in East Africa. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), virtually all yams are produced for human consumption, with women responsible for processing yams for consumption. This brief provides an overview of the role of women in yam production, and provides a framework for analyzing barriers to women and technology’s impact on women throughout the cropping cycle. We find that though yam was traditionally considered a man’s crop, it is clear that women farmers contribute greatly to yam cultivation, especially during weeding, harvesting, and processing. Propagation of improved varieties with resistance to pests and diseases like yam mosaic disease has great potential to benefit women farmers. Increased yields and lower post-harvest losses will increase household food security. However, because yams extract high amounts of nutrients from the soil, soil and land management techniques are necessary to ensure future gains in yield. Women’s groups serve as potential venues for dissemination of new yam cultivation and processing technologies. Additionally, women’s groups can undertake new propagation techniques as income generating activities. Women farmers need increased extension efforts to fully benefit from technology improvements.