Year Published
- 2008 (1) Apply 2008 filter
- (-) Remove 2009 filter 2009
- 2010 (5) Apply 2010 filter
- 2011 (3) Apply 2011 filter
- 2012 (0)
- 2013 (5) Apply 2013 filter
- 2014 (2) Apply 2014 filter
- 2015 (2) Apply 2015 filter
- 2016 (2) Apply 2016 filter
- (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017
- 2018 (0)
- 2019 (0)
- 2020 (0)
- 2021 (0)
Research Topics
Populations
- Countries/Governments (2) Apply Countries/Governments filter
- Rural Populations (0)
- Smallholder Farmers (2) Apply Smallholder Farmers filter
- Women (0)
Types of Research
Geography
- East Africa Region and Selected Countries (6) Apply East Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
- Global (3) Apply Global filter
- South Asia Region and Selected Countries (3) Apply South Asia Region and Selected Countries filter
- Southern Africa Region and Selected Countries (4) Apply Southern Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
- (-) Remove Sub-Saharan Africa filter Sub-Saharan Africa
- West Africa Region and Selected Countries (6) Apply West Africa Region and Selected Countries filter
Dataset
- ASTI (2) Apply ASTI filter
- FAOSTAT (3) Apply FAOSTAT filter
- Farmer First (0)
- LSMS & LSMS-ISA (0)
- Other Datasets (2) Apply Other Datasets filter
Current search
- (-) Remove Poverty filter Poverty
- (-) Remove Sub-Saharan Africa filter Sub-Saharan Africa
- (-) Remove Agricultural Productivity, Yield, & Constraints filter Agricultural Productivity, Yield, & Constraints
- (-) Remove 2017 filter 2017
- (-) Remove 2009 filter 2009
- (-) Remove Political Economy & Governance filter Political Economy & Governance
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.
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.
Smallholder farmers in Africa are largely located in poor rural areas, are often geographically dispersed, and have limited access to road and communication infrastructure, thus raising the cost of market participation. This is especially true for farmers growing relatively low value staple crops. This literature review summarizes research on the challenges and innovations in linking smallholder producers of staple grains to markets in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a focus on post-harvest issues including storage, aggregation, and transportation. For each post-harvest stage, we describe challenges faced by farmers and current efforts to address these challenges. In our review, we find a large amount of literature on the constraints to smallholder production and marketing but relatively few examples of innovative or novel technologies designed to improve storage and transportation for rural smallholder producers in Africa. Existing technologies have often been available for some time but have not seen widespread adoption, apparently due to high costs or inadequate funding for on-farm testing and extension. We conclude that the literature is somewhat divided as to whether interventions linking smallholder farmers to markets should be entirely market-driven and focus on linkages that can be profitable without subsidization, or whether NGO- and donor-driven interventions should play a role.