This new Africa Region Sustainable Development Series aims to focus international attention on a range of topics, spur debate, and use robust, evidence-based, informed approaches to advance policy dialogue and policy-making. This new Series synthesizes a large body of work from disparate sources, and uses simple language to convey the findings in an easily-digestible format. Ultimately, we want to seed solutions that can help accelerate the fight to end poverty in Africa. Across Africa, south of the Sahara, agriculture is the predominant sector in the economies of most countries, accounting for between 30 to 40 percent of gross domestic product, and the sector is a leading source of jobs for over two-thirds of Africa’s population. A country’s economic, environmental and social well-being is intricately linked to a healthy, wellperforming agricultural sector. Increasing investments in the farm economy can deliver high-impact development returns such as increasing rural incomes, boosting food security, making cheap and more nutritious food available to Africa’s bustling cities and protecting the environment through innovations such as climate smart agriculture. This is the overarching message of this publication, which explores how the World Bank can help Africa take advantage of a unique confluence of factors that creates a great opportunity for the region to make agriculture the engine of development that it rightfully should be. By publishing the Sustainable Development Series ahead of the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, we seek to inform, indeed persuade, the international community about the significant development challenges confronting Africa, and the new opportunities to overcome them for a better future for all.
Livelihoods, food security, and development processes in Sub-Saharan Africa are highly dependent on land management practices to generate natural ecosystem goods and services. Out of a total population of about 717 million people, almost 60 percent depend for their livelihood...
Agriculture is among the most risk-prone sectors in the economies of Central Asia. Production shocks from weather, pests and diseases and adverse movements in agricultural product and input prices not only impact farmers and agri-business firms, but can also strain...
Esta Política de Estado se sustenta en cuatro ejes temáticos, que hemos convenido en llamar los pilares de la política: a) competitividad; b) innovación y desarrollo tecnológico; c) gestión de los territorios rurales y agricultura familiar; y d) cambio climático...
The report analyses the contribution to date of agricultural water management to poverty reduction and growth in the in sub-Saharan Africa region, the reasons for its slow expansion and apparently poor track record, as well as the ways in which...
The Tugi Silvo-pastoral Project (TUSIP) is a South-South Cooperation between the Tropical Agriculture Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE) and the Akwi Memorial Foundation (AMF) based in the North West Region of Cameroon. The main goal of TUSIP was to...