Market participation by smallholders farmers has the potential to pull farmers out of poverty while at the same time increasing food security at the more aggregate level. This paper looks at the dynamics of smallholder maize and beans marketing in Uganda and Mozambique. Using panel data from...

In developing countries, all too often policies formulated in response to high food prices are inspired by ideology instead of evidence-based policy research. We look at the immediate effects of these shocks faced by households in Uganda on their poverty and well-being. In addition, we look at...

Recent research on the intertemporal dynamics of poverty using microeconomic data often hints at the existence of poverty traps, where some find themselves trapped at a low-level stable equilibrium while others enjoy a higher stable equilibrium. Without a sizable positive shock to well-being,...

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...

To feed a growing and increasingly urbanized population, Uganda needs to increase crop production without further exhausting available resources. Therefore, smallholder farmers are encouraged to adopt sustainable crop intensification methods such as inorganic fertilizer or hybrid seeds. However,...

Agricultural advisory services generally rely on interpersonal knowledge transfers in which agricultural extension agents visit farmers individually or in groups to provide information and advice. This approach is not always effective and has often proved hard to bring to scale, particularly in...

In many developing countries, agricultural extension services are generally biased towards men, with information targeted mainly to male members of a farming household and in formats that are rarely tailored to female members. Nevertheless, female farmers may also benefit from such services as...

Rural women in low- and middle-income countries face multiple constraints in accessing and benefiting from essential complementary resources, technologies, and services for agricultural production and participation in the food system. This paper highlights recent thinking around these...

One of the main drawbacks of current methods to measure market integration is the assumption of constant transaction costs. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric extension to the commonly used threshold models, allowing us to estimate transaction costs in a more flexible way. We illustrate...