The Palgrave Handbook of Agricultural and Rural Development in Africa

The development of the agricultural sector in Africa means an addition to the promotion of food security, expansion of the capacity to absorb labor, and consequent rural development. In the examination of how to domesticate the agenda on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to create a harmonized synergy is the analysis of the effect of devolved governance on rural development. As some scholars see prospects, some prove positive impacts while others remain skeptical about the impact of devolution on agriculture and local labor development. This chapter does not intend to duplicate any of the three perspectives but rather to shift the debate from “whether devolution has the potential to enhance agriculture development or not,” to, “which is the appropriate policy toolbox within devolution that we require” in order to: (1) effectively domesticate and operationalize the SDGs and (2) aggregate the domesticated planning to measure the achievement of the SDGs. The study uses the devolved governance in Kenya in the context of rural and agricultural development sector to examine the SDGs domestication process. In this chapter, we find that, without the reference to specific SDGs and their targets, it is not clear whether development agencies are doing development work as usual or are guided by SDGs framework. In addition, devolution does not necessarily translate to SDGs domestication.

The study investigated youth employment challenge and rural transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The study employed panel data analysis for 54 independent African countries from 2010 to 2017. The results suggest that youth employment (rural and urban) to population ratio, 15+ , has a great positive influence on rural transformation in African countries. However, results also suggest that an increase in unemployed rural population has an inverse effect on rural transformation. The result shows that youth literacy rate has an inverse relationship with youth unemployment rate. More so, the results also suggest that an increase in employment in the agricultural sector (given the employment in other sectors) would lead to a decline in youth unemployment rate in Africa. However, the evidence also shows that an increase in rural population would aggravate the youth unemployment rate in Africa. The chapter concludes that empowering the youth (through actions to facilitate youth skills development and matching rural youth to jobs; facilitate rural youth access to land; improve access to affordable finance by rural youth; promote MSME development; support social protection and safety net programs; and access to social services) is developing Africa through rural transformation. This may come quickly if youth employment becomes the litmus test of Africa’s development policies.

In recent years, Sub-Saharan Africa has been attracting considerable remittance flows. These funds, sent to households usually working in the primary sector, could stimulate the productivity of labor in this sector while improving the human capital. This paper investigates the role of remittances on agricultural labor productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa using the system—generalized method of moments (system-GMM) on a panel data for 39 countries from 2000 to 2016. The results reveal that remittances have a strong negative impact on agricultural labor productivity. The analysis also finds that higher GDP per capita and higher human capital generate lower agricultural labor productivity. Furthermore, it provides evidence of a positive link between trade openness and agricultural labor productivity in the primary sector.

The agriculture sector plays an important role in rural and economic development as well as the attainment of poverty reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA). However, the productivity of the sector—measured as the share of agriculture value added in GDP—has witnessed gradual but consistent decline in recent years. Various studies have been conducted on the role of infrastructure in boosting agricultural productivity but most of the studies on electricity infrastructure have approached the subject from an impact evaluation and micro-level analysis. This study differs by examining the impact of electricity access on agricultural productivity from a cross-country and macro perspective. It investigates the factors influencing the trend of agricultural productivity in SSA countries, and specifically examines the impact of electricity access in boosting agricultural productivity. Using panel cointegration and random effect on a panel of 45 SSA countries (1980–2017), we investigate the impact of overall, urban and rural electricity access on agricultural productivity in SSA. The study finds that while overall and urban electricity access have positive and significant impacts on agricultural productivity, the effect of rural electrification is insignificant. This implies that promoting rural electrification might not be sufficient for enhancing agricultural productivity in SSA. Rather, policymakers should focus on electricity infrastructure intervention that supports the entire agricultural value chain.

The agricultural sector is typically the biggest employer of labour in most African countries, yet it is also typically the most under-capitalised and most neglected by policymakers. While a number of studies have highlighted the positive impact of innovations on farm productivity, increased productivity does not necessarily lead to improved income or profit. For many smallholders, the most consequential, and often the most ignored, constraints exist beyond the farm gate in the value chain. These constraints include the lack of information and technological capacities for post-production processing and packaging, the challenge of quality requirements and delivery for high-valued markets, lack of connections to established market actors, and weak transportation networks. This chapter, therefore, reviews the existing knowledge, and proposes a framework that illuminates the potential of social capital to help smallholders overcome constraints in the agricultural value chain. As well as setting out a new research agenda, this chapter aims to contribute to the design and implementation of more effective interventions.

Despite the rising speculation of the consequences of Large-scale Land Investments (LLIs) in African countries, relevant empirical evidences to evaluate their implications on the households in the host communities remain scarce. This study therefore provides new empirical insights on the implications of LLIs on the households in the communities with LLIs in comparison with those in communities without LLIs in Nigeria. The choice of Nigeria is based on the fact that it is among the top twenty (20) LLIs recipients globally, and among the top ten (10) in Africa. Furthermore, Nigeria is among the few countries in Africa with nationally representative data like the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS_ISA), which contain relevant information on communities, households, and agricultural activities, and which are essential for empirical analysis of the relationships that are considered in the study. Much of the literature on the effects of LLIs are either case studies or reports or investigate the impact of LLIs deals known to have been associated with considerable displacement of segments of the populations that only held customary land rights. There is therefore the need to quantitatively understand the effects of LLIs on household livelihood. The study used Difference-in-Difference (DiD) approach, which is an important impact evaluation technique that estimates the counterfactual for the change in outcome for the households in communities with LLIs in comparison to those in communities without LLIs. The results from the analysis show a negative household livelihood outcome in communities with the presence of LLIs in comparison to the absence of LLIs in such communities.

The role of agriculture in the transformation of a developing economy has been widely established in the development economics literature. This has informed public policy in developing countries to undertake various interventions to enhance agricultural productivity overtime. This chapter set out to analyze whether or not the various interventions to improve agricultural productivity in Uganda are actually serving their intended purpose of boosting productivity and if they are in turn improving the welfare of the participating households. Based on analysis from three waves of the Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) panel data set for Uganda, the results suggest that government policies aimed at enhancing agricultural productivity are actually working. However, it was established that the uptake of these interventions is limited. Several constraints stand in the way to the achievement of their potential impact, which need to be addressed. For instance, it is critical to examine the implementation modalities for extension services provision with the view to ensuring their increased utilization. There should be intensification of information dissemination regarding the availability of the different technologies. Another critical ingredient in increasing agricultural technologies uptake is, the strengthening of farmer cooperatives as these have been found to address some of the binding constraints to the use of agricultural technologies among smallholder farmers.

Labor is an essential input in the production process. The pattern and intensity of its use has generated a lot of attention from the viewpoint of increasing productivity and employment. This study examined the pattern of labor use and labor productivity among agricultural households in Nigeria. The Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) wave 2 (2012/2013) was used. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, partial labor productivity measure, and two-stage least squares regression. The average age of male household head and female household head was 50.74±14.83 years and 59.65±12.69 years respectively. They are mostly married with an average household size of 7 and 4 members for male-headed and female-headed households respectively. The number of labor use during planting and harvesting activities revealed that female-headed household use more family labor than male-headed households while male-headed households use more hired labor during planting and harvesting activities than their female counterpart. Labor use is positively influenced by crop output, age of household head, household size, farm size, herbicide use, and credit access. The use of machinery, wage rate, and farm size negatively influenced labor use. Labor productivity was low, as majority was below the mean cut off point. Labor productivity was 0.45 and 0.41 in male-headed and female-headed households respectively. Factors that affect labor productivity were quantity of fertilizer used, seeds, and type of cropping system employed. Since labor productivity can be enhanced by the use of fertilizers and improved seeds, government should therefore make these inputs available to agricultural households. Also, since agricultural households’ productivity is a critical issue in the pursuit of sustainable agricultural production in Nigeria, efforts should be made to achieve optimum labor use, increase labor productivity and employment in agriculture.

Historically, majority of the poor are rural people with income levels below the poverty line. In Nigeria, the situation becomes more persistent as majority of the population are highly poor and unemployed particularly youths in the rural areas. The dire situation demands that due considerations should be given to the constraints of poverty and unemployment reduction plans when deliberating the strategies that can efficiently enable people to escape the poverty and unemployment cycle. This qualitative study attempts to fill a relevant research gap by examining the constraints of the Youth Employment in Agriculture Programme (YEAP) in Alkaleri, Duguri and Gar rural areas. The findings indicated that the YEAP in Alkaleri, Duguri, and Gar, uses informational skills and economic resources to train and partially empower youth with very little allowance for managing small scale agricultural activities. However, only 7 youth were selected as beneficiaries despite the large number of the population estimated to be over 461,200 within these rural areas with insufficient funding, irregular coordination, monitoring, and motivation after the training and skill acquisitions. These have endangered the goals of the YEAP initiative, because the percentage coverage of the target beneficiaries remains drastically low and the rural areas involved in these programs are densely populated. Thus, unable to reduce poverty and unemployment adequately and instead, the poverty and unemployment rates keep increasing. In conclusion, this study calls for the need to reconceptualize, extend, and modify YEAP toward providing sufficient financial capital for its beneficiaries, efficient training and skills, frequent monitoring, coordination and evaluation, as well as proper coverage and outreach for the majority of the poor and unemployed population.

The adoption of user charges in the consumption of public health care services in Nigeria has been questioned on many grounds, one of which is, the willingness to pay for these services, especially given the high rate of poverty being experienced in the Nigerian economy. While out-of-pocket expenses dominate in households’ payment for health care services in Nigeria, the proportion of Nigerians living in poverty (both in the rural and urban areas) kept increasing every year as indicated by the incidence of poverty data. This unswerving increase in the poverty rate does influence the households’ ability and willingness to pay these charges in Nigeria. Accordingly, this study, using both primary and secondary data, examined the determinants of households’ willingness to pay for public health care services in Nigeria and evaluate the extent to which these factors affect households’ willingness to pay in both urban and rural areas. The findings show that the willingness to pay increased with income in all the cases considered. Distance ranks high as one of the most important price factors that influences the willingness to pay more in public sector health care services for rural dwellers while quality of care was momentous for urban respondents.

In most of the developing world, mobile technology facilitates access to financial services. This chapter provides new evidence on the effect of mobile phone ownership on loan acquisition and agricultural incomes. Data from Malawi’s Integrated Household Survey (IHS) and the logit model are used for the empirical analysis. The results reveal that the higher the number of mobile phones per household, the more likely they are to have a loan, notably in urban areas where mobile technology is more available. Those without a mobile phone are nearly three times more likely to have an informal loan than a formal one. A higher chance of having a non-zero amount of agricultural income is found among households with at least one phone and those with a loan. Finally, female-headed households have a higher likelihood of having no agricultural income and no mobile phone. The results imply that financial inclusion through the improvements in technology can lead households from informal into the formal financial sector, but rural and female-headed households require more attention in terms of outreach policies.

This chapter attempts to answer the question of how wide the agricultural finance gap is in Namibia and the causes of such a gap. Focusing on the demand-supply gap analysis theory, the chapter draws attention to the magnitude of finance gaps found in other countries and reasons why a finance gap exists in agriculture citing methodologies explained by various authors. A quantitative approach is explored to estimate the finance gap in Namibia and a qualitative approach to explain the causes of such a gap using narratives. The study concludes by providing examples from successful banks such as Bank Rakyat Indonesia on some of the alternative ways to provide finance to irrigation farmers

Using Ogun State located in South-western Nigeria, this chapter draws attention to the increase in output productivity of priority crops in the State from 2003 to 2015 due to the acquisitions of over 47,334 hectares of agricultural land across 28 communities in different Local Government Areas (LGAs). From Ogun State Agriculture Data, eight priority crops are analyzed: cassava, maize, rice, melon, yam, cocoyam, potato, and cowpea. Statistics reveal that the cultivation of cassava gives the highest average output of 4,515,620 metric tonnes and yield per hectare of 16.41 relative to other produce which affirms that Ogun State has the most comparative advantage in the cultivation of cassava followed by maize. The chapter further explores other pro-poor programmes directed at ensuring food security in the State.

This chapter analyzes and documents the contribution of Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOS) in facilitating rural transformation in Moshi District, Tanzania. The study involved 150 respondents composed of management and ordinary members of SACCOS. Data were collected through questionnaires and documentary review methods. Results indicated that SACCOS play an important role in facilitating rural transformation by providing financial services in rural Tanzania where most people were not served by the formal financial institutions. The study confirmed SACCOS’ usefulness in increasing the material welfare of its members in terms of living standards, guaranteed income, enhancement of skills and knowledge, employment as well as leadership and governance. It was further found that SACCOS had effect in transforming rural areas in terms of special loan schemes, rural customer size, direct rural investments, and rural income generation programs. There is a positive significant relationship between SACCOS and rural customer size, direct rural investments, and rural income generation programs. It is therefore recommended that cooperative practitioners including Moshi Co-operative University (MoCU), Savings and Credit Co-operative Union League of Tanzania (SCCULT), Tanzania Federation of Co-operative (TFC) and Tanzania Co-operative Development Commission (TCDC) should make more campaigns and educate rural people on the purpose and benefits of a SACCOS and let many join SACCOS.

Rural–urban drift and lack of youths’ interest in agriculture among others are possible reasons leading to the gradual disappearance of the Nigerian agriculture sector. The increasing rate of unemployment is an indication that rural–urban interactions and employment play an important role in rural transformation. Due to paucity of national data on rural–urban and labor migration, this study mainly relied on available secondary information complemented by focus group data collected from selected migrant youths who were into motorcycle riding in Ibadan in Oyo State and Abeokuta in Ogun State. Findings showed that youths migrated from rural areas to urban in search for better jobs, from agriculture to non-agriculture because the former is rigorous and tough even though with high potentials of generating employments through value chain.

Cooperatives are autonomous organizations of people built on internationally recognized principles and core values. There are various types of cooperatives in East Africa largely dominated by the Agricultural Marketing Co-operatives (AMCOS). For decades, cooperatives have been fighting against inequalities by promoting members’ socio-economic development, democracy, and increasing people’s control over local economies. They also provide other opportunities such as inputs, and better negotiation position. Despite these efforts, rural poverty and inequality in East Africa is still high. This chapter presents a review of literature on the role of cooperatives in reducing rural poverty and enhancing social inclusion in East Africa, using Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda as case studies. These three countries present good cases because, despite having a large population of people and cooperatives, their people still suffer from abject poverty. In this study, it has been established that, cooperatives are an organ for rural development in whichever form and model and can contribute to rural development whether they are weak or strong. This chapter promotes the use of Integrated Co-operative Model (ICM), which has proved to be effective in linking the rural poor in terms of production, marketing support, and financial services. It recommends member-based education to be given priority especially on how co-operatives can work in an ICM. Training is also needed on member’s roles and responsibilities, knowledge of production, marketing and management. Likewise, it recommends a positive government intervention on punishing the criminals who misused the cooperative funds.

Due to the ongoing degradation of climate factors and the variation in agricultural prices, farmers who are most of the time poor, have to look for other means to completement their agricultural income or to replace them. They are smallholders and they sell their harvest to more prosperous farmers. By engaging in non-agricultural activities, they diversify their source of income. A hypothesis that non-agricultural revenue has a positive influence on farmers’ total revenue in the groundnut producing area of Senegal was formulated. The hypothesis has been confirmed with the usage of multinomial logit model, which means that each farmer must get involved in at least a non-agricultural activity and then face low financial and climatic risks. Revenues from these non-agricultural activities may allow these farmers to finance at least one part of their farming and not to rely much on the government.

Africa’s agricultural transformation through large-scale agricultural land investments (LALIs) aims at increasing production; create employment opportunities, and enhance infrastructure development. After years of ‘experimentation’ and incentives to investors to boost this transformation process, the expected transformation has not translated adequately to increased job opportunities for the active population, particularly the youth. This study engages the Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) to provide empirical insights to this disconnect. Using the Tanzania case study, the study shows that the occurrence of LALIs has not effectively delivered on its expectations of employment creation for the youths mainly influenced by the framework and capacity of indigenous institutions. The chapter presents some recommendations on how informal institutions and local capacity can be harnessed to ensure that LALIs create youth employment opportunities in Tanzania.

In Tanzania, there are several laws governing the process of land acquisitions. However, the practice has shown that there are local politics that dominate the process and which often vary between local and foreign investments. Such politics have differentiated gender approaches and impacts and are viewed differently across communities and geographies. Using two investments, one foreign and the other domestic, this chapter explores different approaches used in land acquisitions and the perceptions of communities toward such approaches in Chakenge Village of Kisarawe District in the Coastal Region of Tanzania. The chapter also shows the impact of food insecurity causing labor movement to non-agrarian activities and how the general national political economy in the last decade has shaped the politics of land acquisitions at the local village level.

Agriculture is an important sector in the growth and food sufficiency quest of countries of the world. Some countries have reached food sufficiency level while others are at various level of agricultural development. The Nigeria state is not left out of this quest of attaining food security and food sufficiency. Despite the huge resources investment in agriculture, why has poverty, hunger and unemployment continue to increase? What can be done? The rational choice theory is used to analyse the political economy dimensions of why agricultural policies fail in Nigeria. When the Nigerian state gets it right in the Agricultural sector, it will have ripple effects on other sectors and Africa’s food insecurity challenges will be effectively solved.

Since the collapse of the oil boom of the 1970s, there has been a dramatic increase in the incidence of poverty and unemployment in Nigeria. This arises in part from the dwindling performance of the agro-allied manufacturing sector where a properant majority of the poor are employed. This study examines the influence of socio-cultural factors on the performance of selected small-scale agro-allied manufacturing firms in the SouthWestern Nigeria. Also, the study identifies the existing socio-cultural factors capable of influencing the performance of small-scale agro-allied enterprises. The study made use of both primary data, which were purposively sampled, with the administration of questionnaire on 438 small-scale agro-allied enterprise owners/managers. The areas of coverage included Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ondo, and Ekiti State. The data were analyzed using binary logistic regression model. The finding of the study revealed that there was significant relationship between socio-cultural factors and small-scale agro-allied firms in Nigeria. The result also revealed that religious beliefs, burden of extended family, ostentatious life style, and social spending exerted significant influence on the firms investigated. The study concluded that small-scale agro-allied manufacturing firm is multidimensional in nature as it is largely driven by socio-cultural phenomena.

Large-scale land investments have been a characteristic feature of Zimbabwe’s land reforms. This has been evident in the mega sugarcane estates in the Lowveld, which requires an in-depth analysis of the different actors, labor processes, and labor arrangements. Labor reserves in the large-scale sugarcane plantations emanate from the different surrounding communal and fast track farms creating new pools of labor and also the need to understand how different social arrangements influence the reason why individuals and communities invest their energy in working the sugarcane plantations. This, therefore, leads to an understanding of why and how the labor platforms are crafted, utilized, and appreciated by the management in the large-scale land investments. This study anchors its empirical investigations on one of the large-scale sugar estates in the Southern Lowveld and strong orientations from political economy particularly the class dimension of how people are stratified in plantations and the role that different political and economic factors affect the farmworkers. It concludes by recommending the need for society-centered policies on the labor force in sugar estates in Zimbabwe.

This work explores the potential of the cassava crop and its value chain in helping alleviate poverty among cassava farmers and a range of other stakeholders along its value chain, especially in Nigeria’s rural areas. It adopts the empirical method of analysis and contends that investments in activities that enhance the cassava value chain would, among other things, lead to increases in farmers’ income. Until recently, cassava was tagged a “poor man’s crop” and grown as a shield against hunger and as a means of generating income by rural dwellers. However, the recent discovery of high yield cassava plants and several new industrial uses for processed cassava tuber has transformed it into a sort-after crop by high-end industrial users.

Women participate active in agricultural activities in Nigeria but in terms of returns on the effort employed they are highly marginalized as a result of poor participation in marketing of their farm products. It is on this ground that the study intends to examine the micro-determinants of women participation in agricultural value chain in some selected farm communities in Esan West Local Government Area (LGA) of Edo State, Nigeria. The study was descriptive in nature using a simple questionnaire to draw information from 162 women farmers purposively selected in some communities in Edo West LGA, Edo State, Nigeria. All the variables were converted into categorical variables and Probit Regression was used to estimate the model. The findings have shown that level of education, age of women, land inheritance, distance from house to market Centers, and community responsibilities are significant. The study therefore recommends that there is need for adult literacy classes among women farmers in this region, and women of ages 35–59 years are crucial to agricultural production and therefore the government should have specialized agricultural extension workers to attend to their farm needs. Lastly, government should continue its efforts in ensuring that women are treated evenly in the matter of land inheritance and there should be land allocation policy for women.

This chapter offers an analysis of the relationship between employment generation, social conditions of work, and the current pattern of growth in Mozambique. Following a political economy approach and a triangulation between qualitative and quantitative data and focusing on the organization and patterns of work, the chapter explores the contradiction between employment creation and better social conditions in the current productive structure in the country through the lens of a case study in the forestry agro-industry in Niassa province. This research shows that the type of employment created reflects the prevailing mode of organization of production and work, in which the profitability of the companies relies on low wages and insecure working conditions with implications for the well-being, sustainability of livelihoods, and the economy broadly.

Available data indicated that, some traditional agricultural export commodities like cocoa and rubber have remained on Nigeria’s agricultural export list, while others like groundnut and coffee have almost disappeared from the export list. In the same vein, non-traditional agricultural export commodities like sesame seed and cashew nuts have started featuring prominently on the export list. In line with theory, the econometric analysis carried out confirmed that a major policy change, which can provide a boost for agricultural exports, is the depreciation of the real exchange rate. For all the agricultural export commodities analyzed in the study, the coefficient of the exchange rate was positive and highly significant.

This concluding chapter of the handbook summarizes the main issues based on the broader heading of “Agricultural Investments and Rural Development in Africa: Salient Issues and Imperatives.” It underscores the salient points that resonate, which are covered in this order: development and employment issues; development and agricultural finance; development, industrialization and technology adoption; access to land and household livelihood; agricultural value chain and food security; and politics of land acquisition and agricultural productivity. The chapter surmises that to achieve the desired agricultural transformation and development in Africa more frantic emphasis is required in terms of crafting policies that will make finance available to the agricultural sector; reducing employment bottlenecks; access to agricultural-friendly technologies; adherence to principles guiding land acquisitions. The above is imperative in ensuring that the much talked about agricultural and rural development in Africa is both people-oriented and sustainable.