Author
Listed:
- Chiuri, Wanjiku
- Birachi, Eliud
- Buruchara, Robin
- Adekunle, Wale
- Fatunbi, Oluwole
- Pali, Pamela N
- Wimba, Benjamin
- Bizosa, Alfred
- Nyamurinda, Birasa
- Nyamwaro, Sospeter O
- Habumugisha, Pascal
- Tuyisenge, Jacqueline
- Bonabana-Wabbi, Jackline
- Karume, Katcho
- Kasenge, Valentine
- Kamugisha, Rick
- Fungo, Bernard
- Tumwesigye, Steven
- Kato, Edward
- Nkonya, Ephraim
Abstract
The Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA) commissioned a pilot study to understand the role of markets and marketing systems in African agriculture and to test the Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) and its innovation platforms (IPs) as a new strategy for wealth creation. This was in response to the fact that Sub-Saharan Africa’s small-scale farmers seem to have been trapped in cycles of poverty, and that the regional economy has stagnated. Using a market baseline survey in Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme (SSACP) found that disorganised markets and marketing were major factors in perpetuating poverty cycles and subsistence agriculture. These markets are characterised, among others, by too many players within a value chain, a lack of collective marketing and collective purchasing, poor transport infrastructure, a lack of value addition, poor market information, poor access to market information or a total lack of market information, and unfavourable trade policies and/or a lack of any. Although smallholder farmers are the highest investors in terms of land, tools, time, labour, inputs and transport along the value chains, they benefit least when it comes to earnings. Hence it is not economical to produce surpluses in the absence of assured markets, good market policies and reliable marketing strategies. The results show that gender is an important component in the value chains, depending on the historical realities. In the DRC, for example, a country that has been in crisis for long, women have ventured into long- and short-distance trade. In Uganda, a country that has been at peace for at least 20 years, men trade more and further away from home. In Rwanda, where there has been 15 years of peace, men and women seemed to share the trading space in the country equally. It was also observed that the IAR4D approach may be the most relevant and appropriate one for addressing poverty in SSA through its integration of markets as core ingredients in agriculture, and the formation of innovation platforms (IPs) with stakeholders interested in the plight of farmers in their localities.
Suggested Citation
Chiuri, Wanjiku & Birachi, Eliud & Buruchara, Robin & Adekunle, Wale & Fatunbi, Oluwole & Pali, Pamela N & Wimba, Benjamin & Bizosa, Alfred & Nyamurinda, Birasa & Nyamwaro, Sospeter O & Habumugisha, P, 2013.
"Market access for agro-enterprise diversity in the Lake Kivu Pilot Learning Site of the sub-Saharan Africa Challenge Programme,"
African Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, African Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 8(3), pages 1-15, September.
Handle:
RePEc:ags:afjare:160642
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.160642
Download full text from publisher
Citations
Citations are extracted by the
CitEc Project, subscribe to its
RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
- Sparrow, Ashley D. & Traoré, Adama, 2018.
"Limits to the applicability of the innovation platform approach for agricultural development in West Africa: Socio-economic factors constrain stakeholder engagement and confidence,"
Agricultural Systems, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 335-343.
- Aurora A. C. Teixeira & Rosa Portela Forte, 2017.
"Prior education and entrepreneurial intentions: the differential impact of a wide range of fields of study,"
Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 11(2), pages 353-394, March.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:afjare:160642. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaaeaea.html .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.