Investment Priorities for Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction in Asia Shenggen Fan, Joanna Brzeska, and Ghada Shields

Taking successful development interventions to scale is critical if the world is to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and make essential gains in the fight for improved agricultural productivity, rural incomes, and nutrition. How to support scaling up in these three areas, however, is a...

This 2012 Global Food Policy Report is the second in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have...

Rapidly increasing mobile phone coverage, cheaper technology, and an open platform that allows for the development of applications that extend the use of mobile devices provide new ways to reach farmers in isolated places. We investigate the impact of an intervention that uses information and...

Drawing on a household survey collected in eight woredas in seven Ethiopian regions in 2009, as well as on qualitative fieldwork in four of the eight woredas, this paper provides analysis of agricultural extension delivery in Ethiopia. While overall extension services are relatively accessible...

In Uganda, agricultural extension has been hotly debated since the implementation of the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) program in 2001. Conceived as a demand-driven approach and largely publicly funded with services provided by the private sector, the NAADS program targets the...

Decentralized delivery of public services has been promoted as a means to enhance citizen voice and make service provision more responsive to users. Ethiopia has undertaken two rounds of decentralization, making first the regional states and then the district governments responsible for...

In view of the market failures and the state failures inherent in providing agricultural extension, community-based approaches, which involve farmers‘ groups, have gained increasing importance in recent years as a third way to provide this service. The paper discusses the conceptual...

India has nearly 90 million farm households. More than 80 percent of these farmers operate on a small or marginal scale, farming less than two hectares of land. They also usually have one or two buffaloes or cows, reared for milk and dung. Most of these small and marginal farmers fall below the...