Publication database

This report presents findings and best practices from idh's innovating partners with regards to empowering farmers through service delivery, while generating sustainable returns to their businesses. Learn more about their models’ drivers of farmer resilience, cost reduction and financial sustainability.  And get inspired, by service models helping millions of smallholder farmers out of poverty, in often remote areas and developing economies around the globe.

Contract farming (CF) agreements are presently being restructured to form part of more complex Inclusive Business (IB) set-ups. Additional instruments, alongside CF, are implemented to overcome the challenges of CF and to adapt to the policy environment in which the different stakeholders operate. This paper develops a theoretical framework that gives insight into how these complex entities are structured and operate in a developing country context. It finds that a high dependence by the offtaker in the first case study stimulates a higher level of commitment and investment by this stakeholder in the contract arrangement. In turn, this increases the asset specificity aspect, which then requires safeguards to ensure the smallholders adhere to the contractual agreement. A higher dependency in this particular study also resulted in a higher number of smallholders being engaged in the contract, requiring mechanisms to efficiently monitor and coordinate them.

This paper is part of a series of papers on inclusive agribusiness written for the “Towards a Global Research and Learning Agenda for Inclusive Agribusiness” workshop in March 2017. This issue focuses on understanding and influencing enabling policies for Inclusive agribusiness (IAB). Despite the large number of IAB initiatives, little has been done in terms of meta-analysis regarding enabling and constraining policy factors and cross country comparison. A key issue is not just the policy settings, but also the processes and platforms by which business, policy and other actors engage to transparently work on improved enabling conditions. A knowledge and learning agenda would consequently need to look at both substantive policy issues and processes.

This publication outlines how the SDGs offer a compelling growth strategy for African business, pointing to an economic prize of at least US$1.1 trillion by 2030 for the African private sector and the potential to create 85 million new jobs. The report highlights opportunities in four sectors: food and agriculture, energy, health and cities.

This report tells the story of the first five years of Technical Assistance Facility (TAF), an independently funded organisation by the EU and other donors, working in tandem with the African Agriculture Fund (AAF). It concludes that the setup of the facility allows it to bridge the cultural and language divide with introductions at board level to AAF investee companies, is an effective platform from which to design and implement inclusive projects which build on the AAF's investments, enhance commercial and social value for the companies, and extend business models to benefit low income consumers, employees, producers and micro-entrepreneurs

The Earth Security Report 2017 provides a roadmap for global business to align their growth to the demands for social inclusion and environmental security that are defining the countries in which they operate, whilst navigating the risks and opportunities reflected in the wider Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda. The report reveals that the exposure and impact of global industries to issues such as unemployment and pollution is now happening on a global scale and proposes practical changes that companies can make to link their production and consumption footprint to the sustainable growth of countries.