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...

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...

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...

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...

Prepared for the COMESA policy seminar on “Variation in staple food prices: Causes, consequence, and policy options”, Maputo, Mozambique, 25-26 January 2010 under the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Marketing Project (AAMP)

This report uses panel data on 1,267 smallholder households to monitor changes in their access to markets and services. We find that Kenyan smallholders’ proximity to infrastructure, markets, and services has improved markedly over the last decade. These improvements, however, have not been...

The Feed the Future (FtF) program being implemented in Zambia’s Eastern Province by United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) has its goal of lifting more than a quarter of a million rural people (mostly farmers) out of poverty by 2015 (USAID 2011). The attainment of this...

This report evaluates the 2006/7 Malawi Government Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme (AISP). The main objective of the evaluation is to assess the impact and implementation of the AISP in order to provide lessons for future interventions in growth and social protection. The evaluation...