Africa

Business Innovation Facility (BIF), is a pilot programme funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), that has provided hundreds of inclusive businesses with technical and advisory support, which means the BIF team has been truly inside the ‘engine’ of business. This report is the culmination of the lessons learned during this work, written at the completion of the BIF pilot. The report draws together findings on inclusive business models that work – or don’t – and the journeys that companies are making. »

This paper investigates the determinants of changes in youth and women participation in agriculture by using data from the Living Standards Measurement Surveys-Integrated Surveys of Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). Participation in the agricultural labor force is measured using hours per week in agriculture and change in hours worked per week in agriculture between two survey waves for Nigeria and Uganda. »

This paper in the World Development Journal, studies the role of Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centre (ATDC) in Africa. The ATDC has been considered as an alternative model to pursue sustainability of Chinese foreign aid to African countries. This paper attempts to examine the ATDC scheme, particularly focus on the knowledge construction at macro level of design and the knowledge encounter at micro level of daily operation based on the case studies in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. »

This article indicates that forest foods can contribute significantly to achieving nutrition and food security in the forest-dependent communities. Despite the under-utilization and neglect of forest foods, studies indicate that these foods can enrich household diets, providing essential nutrients and bioactive compounds that can prevent undernutrition and coronary diseases, and provide sources of income for millions of people »

This report of an expert meeting initiated by AgriProFocus in cooperation with Dutch embassy in Ethiopia, highlights the importance of gender analysis in each stage of a (development) program/project. It also provides a practical four-step approach to integrate a gender analysis in projects. »

This case study reviewed social enterprises (SEs) operating in the agriculture and health sectors in Kenya to examine how the lack of a widely-accepted social enterprise definition influences activity in Kenya, identify niches within which agriculture and health sector social enterprises are operating and summarise key findings from discussions with key informants. Social enterprise in Kenya is a dynamic space at the moment, but that there is a lack of common terminology and understanding of how SEs fit into wider sectoral contexts. »