In the context of a growing population in an already densely populated area, agricultural yields will need to increase without putting additional stress on the environment. The adoption of modern inputs by smallholders is an important ingredient of agricultural transformation. In this study we explore plot-level, household-level, and institutional-level characteristics associated with agricultural technology adoption behavior among smallholder farmers. The aim is to uncover correlations that can guide the design of policies and incentives that are likely to increase adoption. We explicitly differentiate between fixed costs that are likely to affect the decision to use the technology and variable costs that are more relevant for the decision regarding use intensity. In addition, we examine how the importance of each of these characteristics differs with asset status. To do so, we use data from about 1,880 potato plots cultivated by 500 randomly selected potato growers in southwestern Uganda. We first categorize households into poorly endowed and well-endowed asset classes based on their access to productive assets. We then estimate double-hurdle models for take-up and use intensity of fertilizer for each group. The results show that the factors associated with the decision to use fertilizer are often different from those associated with the decision about how much fertilizer to use and that the characteristics correlated with fertilizer adoption differ between asset-poor and asset-rich farmers. For instance, asset-poor female-headed households are less likely to use fertilizer, but if they do, they use more of it than male-headed households. Our results also suggest fertilizer packaging and distribution are important factors in fertilizer adoption decisions due to their impact on costs related to both indivisibilities and uncertainty about the quality. We derive a range of policy recommendations.

Health-related incentives to reward effort or commitment are commonplace in many professional contracts throughout the world. Typically absent from small-scale agriculture in poor countries, such incentives may help overcome both health issues for remote rural families and supply issues for firms. Using a randomized control design, we investigate the impact of adding a micronutrient-fortified product in contracts between a Senegalese dairy processing factory and its seminomadic milk suppliers. Findings show significant increases in frequency of delivery but only limited impacts on total milk delivered. These impacts are time sensitive and limited mostly to households where women are more in control of milk contracts.

Adoption of quality-enhancing technologies is often driven largely by farmers’ expected returns from these technologies. Without proper grades, standards, and certification systems, however, farmers may remain uncertain about the actual financial return associated with their quality-enhancing investments. This report summarizes the outcomes of a short video-based randomized training intervention on wheat quality measurement and collective marketing among 15,000 wheat farmers in Ethiopia. Our results suggest that the intervention led to significant changes in farmers’ commercialization behaviors—namely, it prompted farmers to adopt behaviors geared toward assessing their wheat’s quality using easily implementable test-weight measures, assessing the accuracy of the equipment used by buyers in their kebeles (scales, in particular), and contacting more than one buyer before concluding a sale. The training also led to improvements in share of output sold, price received, and collective marketing, albeit with important limitations. First, farmers who measured their wheat quality received a higher price, but only if their wheat was of higher quality. Second, farmers who found that their wheat was of higher quality were more reluctant to aggregate their wheat (that is, sell their products through local cooperatives) than those who found that their wheat was of lower quality. Lastly, the training intervention led to better use of fertilizer in the following season. Our discovery that a short training intervention can significantly change farmers’ marketing and production behavior should encourage the development of further interventions aimed at enhancing farmers’ adoption of improved technologies and commercialization.

This paper uses Ghana as a case study to illustrate the extent to which Chinese manufacturing firms are driving manufacturing in an African country. Through a combination of desktop and field research, the author finds that the total number of Chinese manufacturing investments in Ghana indeed increased during past decade, but quite a few projects have been abandoned or not implemented because of the unfavorable investment environment. Small and large manufacturing projects can be found in different sectors, such as plastics, steel, pharmaceuticals, and others. All of the manufacturing investments target local or regional markets, either taking advantage of local raw materials or seeing opportunities in a market with little competition. Transitioning from trading to manufacturing investment and clustering are identified as the main patterns by which Chinese investors establish themselves in Ghana. Chinese firms source simple raw materials from local suppliers but import industrial supplies from abroad. Learning from Chinese business models, a few local businessmen have started their own manufacturing projects, mostly in the plastics recycling sector, but a lack of capital appears to keep some local players from moving up the value chain. Ghana’s weak economy itself is limiting technology transfer and local linkages between Chinese firms and Ghanaians.

Increasing numbers of development agencies and individual projects espouse objectives of women’s empowerment, yet there has been little systematic work on mechanisms by which interventions can enhance women’s empowerment. This gap exists because of the lack of consensus on indicators as well as the lack of attention paid to measuring the effects of different types of interventions on empowerment. This paper identifies the types of strategies employed by 13 agricultural development projects within the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project Phase 2 (GAAP2) that have explicit objectives of empowering women. We distinguish between reach, benefit, and empowerment as objectives of agricultural development projects. Simply including women does not necessarily benefit them, and even activities that benefit do not necessarily empower. To identify strategies to empower women, we build on the domains included in the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) and are working with the GAAP2 portfolio of projects to develop an empowerment metric that is applicable in the project setting (a project-level WEAI, or pro-WEAI). We have identified the following potential domains to be included in pro-WEAI: input into production decision making, control over resources, control over income, leadership, time, physical mobility, intrahousehold relationships, individual empowerment, reduction in gender-based violence, and decision making on nutrition. The GAAP2 projects address these domains through a wide variety of activities that can be grouped into four main types: (1) direct and indirect provision of goods and services; (2) forming or strengthening groups, organizations, or platforms and networks that involve women; (3) strengthening knowledge and capacity through agricultural extension, business and finance training, nutrition behavior change communication, and other training; and (4) changing gender norms through one-way awareness raising or two-way community conversations about gender issues and their implications. In general, projects with activities in more activity areas target more domains of empowerment, and most projects target a core set of six empowerment domains. With the exception of intrahousehold relationships, which is always targeted by activities designed to influence gender norms, projects target domains with different types of activities or combinations of activities. This setup suggests that there may be no one-to-one link between a specific activity and empowerment benefits, and that implementation modalities will determine whether and how an activity contributes to women’s empowerment. The effectiveness of these project strategies will be assessed using both quantitative and qualitative methods throughout the GAAP2 research project.

This paper assesses whether fertilizer subsidy programs can be better targeted to resource-poor farmers using the case of Ghana and proxy means test approaches. Past fertilizer subsidy programs in the country have not been particularly targeted to the poor, even as targeting poor and smallholder farmers has become key in the program implementation guidelines. As a result, many poor farmers have not benefited from past programs. Our results show that targeting approaches based on proxy means tests that use the correlates of poverty to select beneficiary farmers can potentially improve the poverty outreach and costeffectiveness of Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy programs. Therefore, we propose that the proxy means test approach should be considered for implementing Ghana’s fertilizer subsidy programs, first in a pilot project involving a few communities, and later, if found successful, in a full-scale program.

As a result of recent political reforms, Myanmar has the opportunity to enact major policy changes to reinvigorate its agriculture sector. In this context, Myanmar’s rubber sector has the potential to become an even greater source of export earnings and rural household incomes, but there are major challenges related to low rubber productivity and poor rubber quality. Using data from the Mon State Rural Household Survey (MSRHS) conducted from May to June 2015, as well as qualitative data collected from rubber producer focus groups and other interviews with rubber producers, traders, and processors, this paper describes the cost structure of rubber production in Mon State. We then estimate smallholder production costs and the profitability of smallholder rubber production under various alternative yield and price scenarios. The results suggest that if the weaknesses hindering the profitability of the rubber sector are not addressed, the rubber sector will likely stagnate. Moreover, in the absence of a major increase in world prices (substantially above the 2000–2016 average), new rubber investments will not be profitable without major improvements in yield and quality. Further, increasing only yields or only quality, or only improving the institutional environment, will not result in positive returns on investment for smallholders; reforms are needed in all three areas. If these weaknesses are addressed, however, Myanmar’s new investments will be profitable and Myanmar could become an important rubber producer and exporter on the world stage.