Ghana’s aquaculture sector is among the recent success stories of fast-growing agricultural value chains in Africa south of the Sahara. The sector has also shown its vulnerability, with the infectious spleen and kidney necrosis virus spreading throug...

This paper reports on the effects of a training-based intervention seeking to increase household engagement in poultry production in Burkina Faso, analyzing data from a large-scale cluster randomized trial in which 1798 households in 60 communes were...

Small is mighty. Rarely is this more true than for global farming. Across the world, small-scale farmers produce more than half the world’s calories, a figure which rises to almost three quarters in the world’s poorest regions.

Although sustainable intensification (SI) practices such as intercropping of cereals with legumes are believed to offer productivity benefits to farmers, the adoption of cereal-legume intercropping remains low in Malawi. We use dynamic programing to...

Agricultural statistics and applied analyses have benefitted from moving from farmer estimates of yield to crop cut based estimates, now regarded as a gold standard. However, in practice, crop cuts and other sample-based protocols vary widely in the...

The accessibility and availability of forages is a common concern in crop-livestock systems in West Africa; however, options to increase forage production may entail trade-offs within the farm system that can be challenging to quantify explicitly.

By directing increasing shares of their farm production to the market and, thereby, realizing greater incomes, farming households can accelerate local rural economic development. In this study, we examine household and spatial factors that may drive...

his paper provides an analysis on the technical efficiency of iron biofortified bean production in Rwanda, as well as recommendations for implementation of targeted biofortification programs. We employ a three-pronged approach to examine efficiency a...

We study production practices of larger and more capital-intensive farmers (“horti-preneurs”) in horticultural commercial clusters in the central Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Attracted by profitable vegetable markets, more educated farmers rent in land f...

Ghana’s rising population, coupled with erratic weather patterns and soil nutrient deficiencies, pose a significant challenge to food crop production. In responding to universal calls for actions to end poverty, the Government of Ghana (GoG) launched...

This note on sea cucumber farming is part of a series to analyze the different forms of green aquaculture, assessing potential environmental, economic, and social benefits. Aquaculture offers advantages on several levels closely aligned to the Bank’s...

More than 1.3 billion people live in Africa, a number expected to almost double to 2.5 billion by 2050. Food insecurity and resource degradation in a changing climate are pressing concerns with geopolitical significance. For decades, agricultural r...