After two decades of de-urbanization, Zambia is again becoming increasingly urban. While the urban share of the population fell to 35% in 2000 due primarily to the decline of the copper industry, over half of Zambia’s people will be residing in urban areas by 2040. Given this urbanization...

Millions of smallholder farm households in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are net consumers of staple crops, and millions of poor urban households spend a significant share of their income purchasing staple foods. Recent research has underscored the major effects of changes in food prices on poverty,...

The view that widows and their dependents face greater livelihood risks in the era of HIV/AIDS is indeed supported by nationally-representative survey results from Zambia. Efforts to safeguard widows’ rights to land through land tenure innovations involving community authorities may be an...

Beyond the obvious catastrophic effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic on mortality, demographic changes, and the suffering of individuals and their families, we are still only learning about the complex longer-term effects of the pandemic on poverty and vulnerability. For example, the HIV/AIDS...

Since the southern African food crisis of 2001/02, the ‘new-variant famine’ (NVF) hypothesis first proposed by de Waal and Whiteside (2003) has become an important part of the conventional wisdom surrounding the relationship between HIV/AIDS and food crises in the region. The NVF hypothesis...

Targeted fertilizer subsidies are growing in popularity in Sub-Saharan Africa and are a pillar of the Government of the Republic of Zambia’s (GRZ’s) agricultural sector strategy. For example, over the 2004 to 2011 fiscal years, the budget allocation to the Fertilizer Support Programme (FSP)...

The successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia is a major achievement in African agriculture. Since independence in 1964, and most notably from the 1970s, the commitment of the Government of Zambia (GoZ) to ensuring food security through the involvement of smallholder...

The successful development and diffusion of improved maize seed in Zambia during the 1970s–80s was a major achievement of African agriculture but was predicated on a government commitment to parastatal grain and seed marketing, the provision of services to maize growers, and a pan-territorial...

Nearly three decades after the initiation of agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), subsidies for fertilizer and seed are once again the cornerstone of many SSA governments’ agricultural development and poverty reduction strategies. Zambia is a prime example. In the last...

Input subsidy programs that provide inorganic fertilizer and improved maize seed to small farmers below market rates are currently receiving a great deal of support as a sustainable strategy to foster an African Green Revolution. In recent years numerous countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)...