Coffee is Ethiopia’s most important export commodity, cultivated by over 6 million smallholder farmers in the country, and accounting for about one-third of the country’s commodity exports. While coffee production has increased over the last decade, coffee yields are low and several...

We conducted cascading phone surveys to assess the performance of Ethiopia’s main coffee value chain actors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In general, the coffee value chain actors in Ethiopia appear to have been resilient to the pandemic, despite disruptions. The share of coffee farmers who...

Shirking of front-line government agents can bear important welfare consequences in low-income countries. When effort or output cannot be monitored, motivating agents through contingent rewards is of limited use. We investigate whether enhancing agent’s competence at a task yields higher...

Modern agricultural technologies hold huge potential for increasing productivity and reducing poverty in developing countries. However, adoption levels of these technologies have remained disappointingly low in Africa. This paper analyzes the effect of access to credit on the likelihood of...

We survey efforts that track food security in Africa using phone surveys during the COVID-19 pandemic. Phone surveys are concentrated in a few countries mostly focusing on a narrow theme. Only a few allow heterogeneous analyses across socioeconomic, spatial, and intertemporal dimensions across...

This paper provides a literature review on youth employment challenges in rural Africa. The rapidly changing demographic structure across the continent is expected to have important economic and social consequences, especially for employment. So far, despite sustained economic growth, African...