In Africa, most development strategies include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that small farms are productive in the African context and that smallholders do not forgo economies of scale—a premise supported by the often...

Most women farmers in developing countries engage in subsistence agriculture. Previous research highlights a variety of barriers hindering women’s ability to participate in the production and marketing of cash crops, which though riskier can be much more profitable. A study by the World...

The vast majority of households in Malawi are involved in agriculture, and improving agricultural productivity, particularly for women, who tend to attain lower yields than men, could lead to significant poverty reduction and improvements in gender equality. This study asks two main questions:...

Between 2014 and 2016 unprecedented and consecutive climatic shocks ravaged Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. The largest ever emergency relief operation in the country’s history ensued. The pathways and extent to which the humanitarian response protected livelihoods remain...

Traditional per capita measures of poverty assign the same poverty status to individuals living in the same household and overlook differences in living standards within households. There has been a long-standing need for a tool that enables poverty measurement at the individual level, while...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created urgent demand for timely data, leading to a surge in mobile phone surveys for tracking the impacts of and responses to the pandemic. This paper assesses, and attempts to mitigate, selection biases in individual-level analyses based on phone survey data. The...

The disutility of work, often summarily described as effort, is a primal component of economic models of worker and consumer behavior. However, empirical applications that measure effort, especially those that assess the distribution of effort across known populations, are historically scarce....

With the surge in publicly available high-resolution satellite imagery, satellite-based monitoring of smallholder agricultural outcomes is gaining momentum. This paper provides recommendations on how large-scale household surveys should be conducted to generate the data needed to train models...

The paper provides evidence on the evolving socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among households in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda. The data allow estimating the immediate economic impacts of the pandemic, beginning in April 2020, and tracking how the situation evolved through...