The excitement I had four years ago when I started the PhD process has come across in this thesis with the help of many people and organizations. I express my earnest gratitude to all of them. I would like to take the pleasure of the completion of my thesis as an opportunity to thank those who made significant contribution to the successful completion of the PhD journey. Foremost, I am deeply thankful to my promotor Prof. Hans van Trijp and co-promotors Dr Paul Ingenbleek and Dr Workneh Kassa. Dear Hans, I am grateful to the freedom you gave me to explain my views during our discussions, and your incisive suggestions and comments that helped me a lot to grow as a researcher. Your approach to simplify theoretical abstraction, to sketch relationship of concepts/ideas in a simply pictorial representation and to keep me lively, enthusiastic and in the same page of our discussions has remained in my mind as a valuable asset. I also greatly appreciate your 'deep reading' approach that leaves no room even for a small spelling error beside to the metacognitive synthesis, reflections and comments. Paul, I immensely thank you for the day-today guidance, follow-ups, constructive criticisms, comments and suggestions. Had it not for your dedicated support, guidance and insightful inputs, it would have never been possible to fruitfully complete the PhD process in four years. At all stages in the course, I benefited from your advice and astute criticisms, particularly so in eyeing concepts at a theoretical landscape and concretization to the real lives and interpretation schemes of the subjects of this PhD research. You have always a way to encourage and remind that a PhD life is a "going-concern" that demands consistent commitment with the hope to achieve the goal in a foreseeable feature. Your phrases 'get out of your comfort zone', 'be strong' and 'good luck' became my dayfares to think strategically, to aim higher and to energize myself to keep the momentum. I really thank you for the dedication and approach you followed to shape me to become a better researcher. Workneh, you have mentored and supported me in my journey since my undergraduate. In the course, you have treated me as a brother and supported me by setting a good example and sharing your experiences that become an instrumental guide to foster my thinking horizons and to systematically manage challenges. I am very much grateful to you for all the advice, support, inspirational discussions and comments. I would like to thank the members of the defence committee Prof. Han van Dijk, Prof. Arjen Wals, Dr Bas Hillebrand and Prof. Belay Kassa for reviewing my thesis and coming to Wageningen for my public defence. It is a great honour for me to have you in my PhD committee. My gratitude also goes to my paranymphs Robert Goedegebure and Falylath Babah Daouda for your support during my preparation for the PhD defence and your friendship during my PhD study. Undertaking this PhD study would have never been possible without the financial support from the Netherlands Organiz...

An increasing number of the 600 million African smallholders are becoming integrated into the supply chains of supermarkets, fast food chains, and exporters. This process gradually transforms the smallholders into profit-oriented businesses that can make important contributions to rural development and food security. This article brings this issue to the attention of the readership of the Journal of African Business. It connects distinct lines of literature on smallholders, business training, and customer value creation. More specifically, it argues that to equip smallholders with the understanding of how markets function and what customers value, trainings that address fundamental marketing concepts are required. The arguments are captured in a conceptual framework explaining the livelihood performance of rural African smallholders. Based on these arguments, the article formulates implications for development workers and suggests directions for African business research.

In recent years, marketing education has broadened to poor people in developing and emerging countries. In this article, the authors use four empirical studies that apply well-established training design procedures to design a marketing training program for Ethiopian pastoralists. Because pastoralists operate in extremely remote, traditional, and sparsely populated regions of developing and emerging markets, the training complements trainings for the poor applied in urban areas of these countries. As such, the article provides implications for training program designers on how they can adapt the training program procedures to other contexts, thereby making marketing ideas accessible to a large and important new target group for marketing education.

With the increasing scarcity of natural resources, the ability to maintain quality standards during resource-scarce times becomes more critical for business performance.Theories on managing resource scarcity cannot be easily tested in contexts where resources are still abundant. This study therefore turns to an emerging market context in which natural resource availability naturally varies strongly between seasons, namely, that of Ethiopian pastoralists who for many generations learned to adapt to natural resource scarcity. Central to our theory is the natural resource deployment capability, which is the ability of a business to make efficient and effective use of available resources to maintain business performance during resource-scarce times.Using three-wave longitudinal data from 120 pastoral family-based livestock businesses, the study shows that when resources are scarce or extremely scarce, market knowledge helps to better deploy the scarce natural resources, leading to higher product quality. The findings imply that businesses with a better understanding of markets have stronger natural resource deployment capability. The lesson for businesses that are confronted with approaching resource scarcity is therefore to strengthen their ability to deploy resources efficiently and effectively by strengthening their market knowledge in which such capability is rooted.

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