This publication brings some sucessful experiencies in Digital Agriculture in African countries. In this issue of Spore, it is explored how digitalisation is providing women with better access to finance, information and markets, as well as opening up new opportunities for young entrepreneurs to develop apps and other digital services in agribusiness

This report brings a review about the CTA activities in 2018 based on three intervention areas. One is promoting youth entrepreneurship and creating employment for young people, particularly through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The second, digitalisation, cuts across all intervention areas and focuses on the application of digital technologies to transform business models and provide new revenue throughout agricultural value chains.

This document is a brief description of the project "Pejeriz: Rice, entrepreneurship and jobs in West Africa". The project aims to building and strengthening entrepreneurial capacities of rural youth, creating market linkages and promoting value-adding activities for rural youth in the rice value chains of Mali and Senegal. The capacity-building efforts will develop a pool of young professionals with the competence and skills to engage in sustainable business along the rice value chain

This brochure describes the project MANIOC21: releasing  the potential of cassava. The aim is to fine-tune and accelerate innovative and new business models that create market linkages across cassava value chains and promote added-value activities to be scaled-up at the regional level

This document is designed to help researchers apply RCTs so they can gain a more accurate insight into the impacts of different extension strategies in different locations. It provides information on the benefits of an RCT approach in comparison to other impact evaluation models; provides a step-by-step implementation guide and a framework to avoid challenges; and demonstrates how an RCT approach was implemented within the context of the ‘Mind the Gap’ initiative.

This study analyse how agricultural extension can be made more effective in terms of increasing farmers’ adoption of pro-nutrition technologies, such as biofortified crops. In a randomised controlled trial with farmers in Kenya, the authors implemented several extension treatments and evaluated their effects on the adoption of beans biofortified with iron and zinc. Difference-in-difference estimates show that intensive agricultural training can increase technology adoption considerably.

There is an emerging body of literature analyzing how smallholder farmers in developing countries can benefit from modern supply chains. However, most of the available studies concentrate on export markets and fail to capture spillover effects that modern supply chains may have onlocal markets. Here, we analyze the case of sweet pepper in Thailand, which was initially introduced as a product innovation in modern supplychains, but which is now widely traded also in more traditional markets.

Agricultural innovations are seen as a key avenue to improve nutrition and health in smallholder farm households. But details of these agriculture-nutrition-health linkages are not yet well understood. While there is a broad literature on the adoption of agricultural technologies, most studies primarily focus on impacts in terms of productivity and income. Nutrition and health impacts have rarely been analyzed. In this article, we argue that future impact studies should include nutrition and health dimensions more explicitly.

Farm workers in developing countries often belong to the poorest of the poor. They typically face low wages, informal working arrangements, and inadequate social protection. Written employment contracts with clearly defined rights and obligations could possibly help, but it is not clear how such contracts could be introduced and promoted in traditional peasant environments. To address this question, we develop and implement a randomized controlled trial with farmers in Côte d’Ivoire.

Contract farming has gained in importance in many developing countries. Previous studies analysed effects of contracts on smallholder farmers’ welfare, yet mostlywithout considering that different types of contractual relationships exist. Here, we examine associations between contract farming and farm household income in the oilpalm sector of Ghana, explicitly differentiating between two types of contracts,namely simple marketing contracts and more comprehensive resource-providing contracts.