In the late 1990s, several governments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) embarked on various market reforms to improve commodity market performance. The success of such market reforms depends partly on the strength of the transmission of price signals between spatially separated markets and between...

Groundnuts play an integral role in the livelihoods of the majority of the Zambian population, particularly the rural households. The crop is produced by nearly half of the estimated 1.4 million rural smallholder households, making it the second largest, after maize, in terms of production...

Nearly three decades after the initiation of agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), subsidies for fertilizer and seed are once again the cornerstone of many SSA governments’ agricultural development and poverty reduction strategies. Zambia is a prime example. In the last...

Zambia and particularly the Eastern province have one of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world. The most vulnerable are the children from rural households which depend entirely on seasonal agricultural production and income, and survive on diets that are deficiency in proteins and other...

This study employs both nonparametric and parametric methods to examine the influence of household expenditure and other demographic variables on household consumption of calories in Tanzania, using recent survey data. Under each estimation strategy we employ, we find significant and positive...

This study employs a multivariate Tobit model to investigate whether food aid flows of the main donor countries – USA, EU (Community Aid and Member States), Canada, Japan and Australia – respond to recipient countries’ needs and the extent to which the donors interact in their food aid...

This article investigates the impact of nonfarm employment on farm household income and way out of poverty, using farm household data from Brong-Ahafo region of Ghana. A propensity score matching model is used to evaluate the impact participating in both wage and self-employment. Separate...

Since the colonial era, the expansion of the Senegalese economy was greatly sustained by the agricultural sector in which more than three-fourths of the total population were involved. A 2.3 percent average annual growth of total production during the sixties matched the speed at which the...

This paper examines the environment within which West African countries are designing their regional self-reliance food security strategy following the Uruguay Round Agreements on Agriculture (URAA). The self-reliance strategy combines regionally-coordinated domestic food production with food...

Introduction The purposes of this paper are: (1) to introduce the social capital paradigm; (2) to present evidence that social capital has an important role in poverty reduction; and (3) to suggest several policy prescriptions for building and using social capital to reduce poverty. The social...