Rural Aspirations: Reflections for Development Planning, Design and Localized Effects

Mausch, Kai; Harris, D. C.; Diez, Javier Revilla

doi:10.1057/s41287-021-00407-y

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…There are many, poorly understood, reasons why rural households make the choices they do. Recent work on aspirations may shed further light on these (Mausch et al, 2021). Nevertheless, uptake of improved technologies remains poor and the relation between LPC, farm performance and personal daily incomes, as represented in Figure 4, illustrates why the economic incentives for adoption are small and may fail to motivate investments by much of the target population.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Land and technology requirements for economically prosperous smallholder farming in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Tanzania

Harris,

Mausch,

Chamberlin

2024

Outlook Agric

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Making a living from a small farm is difficult in sub-Saharan Africa. In this paper, we quantify how difficult, using a simple, robust, relation between per capita daily income from farming (FPDI), land per capita and whole-farm net profitability per hectare. This relation allows the calculation of the land area required to generate various levels of household income as a function of farm performance. We use nationally representative household data for Tanzania to investigate the range of whole-farm profitability and to estimate an upper limit for it. For 6818 cases where households with land reported figures for gross crop and livestock revenues and for costs in any of the three years 2009, 2011 or 2013, actual median whole-farm net profitability was only $454/ha/y even without including the opportunity cost of family labour. When those were considered, median net profitability was negative $238/ha/y, i.e. a net loss. The maximum whole-farm profitability achieved was $4485/ha/y without family labour costs and $2742/ha/y with it. We evaluated actual and potential farm performance for their ability to generate a range of values of FPDI up to $10 per person per day. Most farms are not very profitable, particularly when household labour costs are considered, and few would be considered economically prosperous. Our analysis underscores the fact that improving their operations or adopting new technologies alone is unlikely to lift many smallholder farmers out of poverty in developing countries, given typical farm size distributions and reasonable assumptions about the realized economic returns to adoption of currently available agricultural technologies. While continued agricultural R&D investments are certainly worthwhile, such efforts alone will be insufficient to meaningfully address welfare needs of the world's rural poor. This suggests that agricultural development programs should expand their attention to incorporate off-farm and non-farm components of the rural economy.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are many, poorly understood, reasons why rural households make the choices they do. Recent work on aspirations may shed further light on these (Mausch et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land and technology requirements for economically prosperous smallholder farming in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Tanzania

Harris,

Mausch,

Chamberlin

2024

Outlook Agric

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Seed system interventions which follow a linear development model with a singular vision of development are at risk of a ‘lock-in’ to technical solutions and fixes, unable to solve complex development issues of poverty, nutrition and inequality. It is clear that the private sector alone is unable to push innovations such as improved varieties of sorghum in contexts with insufficient demand-pull due to insurmountable levels of risk and uncertainty faced by both the private sector (seed companies, processors) and farming households, and due to the multiple objectives and aspirations by farming households beyond income generation (Mausch et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contextualizing private sector-based seed system development: The case of sorghum in Eastern Africa

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Private sector-based seed system development remains a key development intervention in Sub-Saharan Africa. Seed system interventions promoting the adoption of improved varieties through the private sector generally follow a linear, market-oriented technological adoption logic. A qualitative case study of the sorghum seed system in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania demonstrates that this model may not be able to drive the broad-scale adoption of improved sorghum varieties and to generate significant benefits for small sorghum-farming households. The findings suggest that the agro-ecological, social, and political-economic contexts critically determine the role improved varieties and the private sector can play in rural development. Improved sorghum varieties promoted by both the public and private sectors may not suit the needs, preferences and contexts of farming households. Seed companies hold sorghum as an add-on in their portfolio, investing less resources and research into sorghum compared to more profitable crops such as vegetable and maize seeds. Significant political-economic obstacles exist that favor the support of cash crops such as maize and rice, limiting the growth and development of the private sector in the sorghum seed system. We conclude that future interventions should build on approaches that aim to develop more diverse channels of seed delivery in both the formal and informal seed systems, adopt a livelihoods perspective to evaluate the costs, benefits, and risks associated with the adoption of new technologies, and acknowledge that seed system interventions are only one out of a portfolio of interventions to generate rural development.

show abstract

“…The diversity of livelihoods has been emphasized, leading to distinguish onfarm, off-farm, 4 and non-farm activities (Ellis 2000). Yet, there are many regions, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where agriculture is the main livelihood for the immense majority of people, and non-farm activity opportunities are rare (Losch et al 2012). In this case, it is more useful to concentrate on analyzing the diversity of agricultural activities rather than livelihood activities.…”

Section: Presentation Of the Combined Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Assess Smallholder Farmers' Adoption of New Technologies in Development Interventions

Kapgen

Roudart²

2022

Eur J Dev Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In spite of decades of research, the complexity of new technology uptake by smallholder farmers in the context of development interventions is still little understood. In order to unravel the motives for, and barriers to, technology adoption, we propose a multidisciplinary qualitative framework that expands the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework with the agronomic Agrarian system approach and the Development anthropology-based ECRIS (Rapid Collective Inquiry for the Identification of Conflicts and Strategic Groups) approach. Such a framework allows to analyze smallholder farmers' livelihoods, agricultural activities from an ecological cum technical cum economic point of view, and social learning processes involving power relationships. Its use is exemplified by studying the adoption of stone bunds in an agroecological development program in Burkina Faso. Many farmers cannot adopt this technology fully because of agricultural production system or livelihood shaped barriers, and because of power relationships bearing on the technology uptake process. KeywordsAnalytical framework • Innovation adoption • Agroecology • Burkina Faso • Farmer groups • Farming system • Power asymmetry • Social learning Résumé Malgré des décennies de recherche, la complexité de l'adoption de nouvelles technologies par les petits exploitants agricoles dans le cadre d'interventions de développement est encore mal comprise. Afin d'appréhender les motivations et les obstacles liés à l'adoption de technologie, nous proposons un cadre d'analyse qualitatif pluridisci-* Diane Kapgen

show abstract

Rural Aspirations: Reflections for Development Planning, Design and Localized Effects

Cited by 11 publications

References 48 publications

Land and technology requirements for economically prosperous smallholder farming in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Tanzania

Land and technology requirements for economically prosperous smallholder farming in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Tanzania

Contextualizing private sector-based seed system development: The case of sorghum in Eastern Africa

A Multidisciplinary Approach to Assess Smallholder Farmers' Adoption of New Technologies in Development Interventions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About