Africa

This report (PDF) by the Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition in West Africa of FAO, in collaboration with UNESCO, is a result of an online discussion on rural radio and community media, organized in February 2015. This initiative aimed to contribute to current debates about the challenges and opportunities of the role that rural radio and community media can have to young people to improve the resilience and food security in West Africa. »

This report is the result of an e-debate of three weeks on “Youth sustaining family farming through ICTs”, organised by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA), in collaboration with the African Youth Foundation (AYF), in October 2014. »

In order to inform gender targeting of rural finance policy, this paper by IFPRI investigates which financial products best improve farmers’ productivity, resilience, and welfare, and whether benefits affect men and women equally. Using a randomized field experiment in Senegal and Burkina Faso, the authors compare male and female farmers who are offered index-based agricultural insurance with those who are offered a variety of savings instruments. »

This research (PDF) initiated by the Rural Finance working group of NpM, coordinated by ICCO Terrafina Microfinance and carried out in cooperation with AgriProFocus and the Wageningen UR, aimed to investigated the bottlenecks that exist to finance smallholder farmers. The research provides insight into how food production systems work and how they can be strengthened with »

This article by The East African provides a civil-society perspective on climate smart agriculture (CSA) and questions its current practices in East Africa. The article argues that widespread use of fertilisers and other chemicals does not necessarily guarantee increased productivity neither does it ensure that smallholder farmers benefit. »

In this publication (PDF) by the Center for International Forestry Research (Cifor), scientists argue that people in Mali use trade as a medium to adapt their way of life in the face of climate change and other forms of stress. This study highlights the importance of considering the social construction of livestock market systems and marketing behaviours as adaptive strategies of livestock producers to multiple changes »