Women play important roles at different nodes of both agricultural and off-farm value chains, but in many countries their contributions are either underestimated or limited by prevailing societal norms or gender-specific barriers. We use primary data collected in Asia (Bangladesh, Philippines) and Africa (Benin, Malawi) to examine the relationships between women’s empowerment, gender equality, and participation in a variety of local agricultural value chains that comprise the food system.

Classical innovation adoption models implicitly assume homogenous information flow across farmers, which is often not realistic. As a result, selection bias in adoption parameters may occur. We focus on tissue culture (TC) banana technology that was introduced in Kenya more than 10 years ago. Up till now, adoption rates have remained relatively low.

With support from The Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA), through a call for proposal, Hello Tractor an agriculture technology social enterprise has been selected to implement ICT-enabled smallholder mechanisation services with the objective to create jobs for youth across Nigeria and Kenya over a one-year period. Hello Tractor has a bold vision to create sustainable value for tractor owners and to radically transform how the smallholder agricultural ecosystem interacts with and derives value from technology.

Many developing countries are experiencing a rapid expansion of supermarkets. New supermarket procurement systems could affect farming patterns and wider rural development. While previous studies have analyzed farm productivity and income effects, possible employment effects have received much less attention. Special supermarket requirements may entail intensified farm production and post-harvest handling, thus potentially increasing demand for hired labor. This could also have important gender implications, because female and male workers are often hired for distinct farm operations.

Many of the world’s food-insecure and undernourished people are smallholder farmers in developing countries. This is especially true in Africa. There is an urgent need to make smallholder agriculture and food systems more nutrition-sensitive. African farm households are known to consume a sizeable part of what they produce at home. Less is known about how much subsistence agriculture actually contributes to household diets, and how this contribution changes seasonally. We use representative data from rural Ethiopia covering every month of one full year to address this knowledge gap.

With the commercialization of agriculture, women are increasingly disadvantaged because of persistent gender disparities in access to productive resources. Farmer collective action that intends to improve smallholder access to markets and technology could potentially accelerate this trend. Here, we use survey data of small-scale banana producers in Kenya to investigate the gender implications of recently established farmer groups. Traditionally, banana has been a women’s crop in Kenya. Our results confirm that the groups contribute to increasing male control over banana.

Objective

The association between farm production diversity and dietary diversity in rural smallholder households was recently analysed. Most existing studies build on household-level dietary diversity indicators calculated from 7d food consumption recalls. Herein, this association is revisited with individual-level 24 h recall data. The robustness of the results is tested by comparing household- and individual-level estimates. The role of other factors that may influence dietary diversity, such as market access and agricultural technology, is also analysed.

The recent proliferation of mobile phones in rural Africa has also led to increased interest in mobile financial services (MFS), such as mobile money and mobile banking. Such services are often portrayed as promising tools to improve agricultural finance, especially among smallholders who are typically underserved by traditional banks. However, empirical evidence on the actual use of MFS for agricultural activities is thin. Here, we use nationally representative data from Kenya to analyze the use of mobile payments, mobile savings, and mobile credit among the farming population.