This report presents the preliminary findings of an evaluation of the 2006/7 agricultural input subsidies programme (AISP). The objectives are to feed back to stakeholders preliminary information about interim findings, proposals and issues for imminent decisions about the 2007/8 season. In...

A key role for USAID and its partners is to identify how their resources can best contribute to increasing the capacity of the private and public sectors in Mali to scale up their investments, and increase the impact of those investments, in relation to the food security dimensions of...

Cotton is an unquestioned success of Zambia’s turn towards a market economy. After privatization in late 1994, seed cotton production rose from 32,000 metric tons (mt) to about 180,000 mt a decade later (three-year averages centered on 1994 and 2005). The number of farmers involved in the...

This paper contributes to literature on agricultural technology adoption by using a novel data set that combines data from two large-scale household surveys with historical rainfall data to understand the determinants and the intensity of adoption of Conservation Farming (CF)practices in Zambia....

With the risk of the drought in the agricultural production areas of Zambia, conservation farming (CF) was introduced as a set of technologies that can improve productivity while reducing plant stress due to moisture constraints. Under animal traction, CF involves using the Magoye ripper to...

The paper gives a brief description of the history and main institutional forms in the agricultural and rural financial services sector–commercial banks, the micro-finance industry, savings and credit cooperative societies, village banks, building societies and the Agricultural Finance...

The study reported in this paper measures differences in profitability between conservation farming (CF) practices and conventional agriculture by comparing the value of differential output with the differential input costs. The main objective is to address and fill several important knowledge...

This paper investigates the relationship between income diversification and income change within Zambian smallholder households, and investigates what the constraints of income diversification are in this group. A panel data set of roughly 7000 smallholder farmer households interviewed in 2001...

Food Security Research Project (FSRP; Rwanda Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Forestry; U.S. Agency for International Development