A consensus exists that extension services, if functioning effectively, improve agricultural productivity through providing farmers with information that helps them to optimize their use of limited resources. Variations in management practices and husbandry skills among small farmers in Kenya...

Despite being framed as a key component of the nation’s poverty reduction strategy, evidence suggests that inputs distributed under Zambia’s Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) tend to be targeted to the least poor rural households.

Despite upward trends in fertilizer application rates on maize fields over the last twenty years, there remains a perception in Kenya that fertilizer use is not expanding quickly enough and that application rates are not high enough to reverse the country’s growing national food deficit. In...

This study uses three waves of nationally representative household-level panel data from Malawi to estimate how receiving an additional kilogram of subsidize fertilizer affects maize production and the value of total crop output across the distribution of smallholder farm households. We use...

The objective of this report is to analyze the effects of smallholder commercialization on food crop input use and productivity in rural Kenya. The main research issues were: (1) To examine the determinants of smallholder fertilizer use on food crops, with a focus on the effects of household and...

Improving the Impact of Market Reform on Agricultural Productivity in Africa: How Institutional Design Makes a Difference Abstract: This paper reviews the emerging empirical record of agricultural marketing policy reform and agricultural productivity, drawing from research on food access and...

This paper studies the dynamics between cash cropping and food crop productivity in Gokwe North District in Zimbabwe, a major cotton producing area. The main research issues were: (1) to identify the determinants of commercialized crop production at the household level; and (2) to determine the...