In many developing countries consumption of animal source foods (ASF) among the poor is still at a level where increasing its share in total caloric intake may have many positive nutritional benefits. This paper explores whether ownership of different livestock species increases consumption of ASF and helps improving child nutritional status, finding some evidence that both food consumption patterns and nutritional outcomes may be affected by livestock ownership in rural Uganda. Our results are suggestive that promoting (small) livestock ownership has the potential for affecting human nutrition in rural Uganda, but further research is needed to more precisely estimate the direction and size of these effects.

No abstract

Droughts are associated with several societal ills, especially in developing economies that rely on rainfed agriculture. Recently, researchers have begun to examine the effect of droughts on the risk of Intimate-Partner Violence (IPV), but so far this work has led to inconclusive results. For example, two large recent studies analyzed comparable data from multiple sub-Saharan African countries and drew opposite conclusions. We attempt to resolve this apparent paradox by replicating previous analyses with the largest data set yet assembled to study drought and IPV. Integrating the methods of previous studies and taking particular care to control for spatial autocorrelation, we find little association between drought and most forms of IPV, although we do find evidence of associations between drought and women’s partners exhibiting controlling behaviors. Moreover, we do not find significant heterogeneous effects based on wealth, employment, household drinking water sources, or urban-rural locality.

Initiatives on the sustainable intensification of agriculture have introduced improved technologies tailored to farmers’ local conditions by trial demonstration with free provision of improved seeds and fertilizers. It is not clear, though, whether smallholder farmers would be willing to pay for these technologies, and what factors determine their informed demand. Using a contingent valuation experiment, combined with information at baseline among 400 households in Northern Tanzania, this study measured farmers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for hybrid maize seed and local inorganic fertilizer. Farmers’ WTP was estimated using a dichotomous contingent valuation with follow-up model. Results showed that the average WTP was 61% higher for hybrid maize seed, and 15% lower for inorganic fertilizer, than their respective average local market prices during the reference period, suggesting that farmers were willing to pay a premium for hybrid maize seed, while they did not seem to be interested in fertilizer purchase at current market price. Moreover, since improved access to extension services was found to positively affect farmers’ WTP, strengthening extension services could be a suitable policy intervention to increase farmers’ demand for improved technologies. On the other hand, farmers’ risk aversion was negatively correlated with WTP for both technologies. This result suggests that encouraging risk reduction options, such as agricultural insurance, could be a useful policy strategy for boosting farmers’ demand for improved agricultural technologies.

In many developing countries consumption of animal source foods (ASF) among the poor is still at a level where increasing its share in total caloric intake may have many positive nutritional benefits. This paper explores whether ownership of different livestock species increases consumption of ASF and helps improving child nutritional status, finding some evidence that both food consumption patterns and nutritional outcomes may be affected by livestock ownership in rural Uganda. Our results are suggestive that promoting (small) livestock ownership has the potential for affecting human nutrition in rural Uganda, but further research is needed to more precisely estimate the direction and size of these effects.