By adapting traditional financial products delivered by microfinance institutions, and making them more flexible to meet the needs of farmers and rural inhabitants, many of these challenges faced by index insurance can be overcome.
An exciting project in Uganda is bringing together a team of ICT entrepreneurs, economists, computer scientists, and agri-business professionals to test whether a highly scalable, high-tech approach can reduce transactions costs and improve market access for smallholders.
Our research will evaluate two separate programs in Senegal and Uganda, and will focus on the degree to which smallholder farmers make the required investments sustainable, the financial and behavioral obstacles they face in doing so and whether additional interventions help farmers overcome these obstacles.
To support the use of agricultural credit using index insurance The Ohio State University (OSU) and the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET), in collaboration with the University of Ghana, will undertake a program of research, outreach, and education.
Our project will contribute to these policy discussions primarily because our experimental analysis will be an important innovation in understanding the impact of contract farming on smallholder welfare.
With appropriate caution given to the findings on household living standards, it is fair to say that the program succeeded for many, but not all targeted households.
Si bien es cierto que si el programa no afectó de manera uniforme a todos los participantes eso no significa que el programa haya fracasado, es importante entender para quién y para cuántas familias el programa realmente logró aumentar los niveles de vida y combatir la pobreza.
Our research indicates that a primary benefit to small farmers of participation in supermarket supply chains may be the decrease in output downside price risk relative to traditional horticulture spot markets.
This brief reports findings of a randomized field experiment that estimated the impact of biometric identification on the behavior of smallholder farmers in Malawi.
Comparing high-growth treatment households with high-growth control households, we obtain estimates of RBD project impacts that are statistically significant and range up to 18 PPP US$ per person, per month, a level that is some four times the average impact.
