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.

P2P business models like Airbnb or Uber provide an organised way to collectively share certain resources. Could similar solutions reduce the barriers to sharing of the limited existing sanitation facilities in low income countries? During 2016 and 2017 Inclusive Business Sweden and Aqua for All, supported by Unilever and funded by Transform, carried out a project named ‘Peer-to-peer Business Models to Meet Sanitation Needs’ to explore this possibility.

PPPLab interviewed the lead partners of 12 public private partnerships (PPPs) working in Kenya and Ghana. This exploration brief presents their way of working with governments and public sectors.  Within these countries, the food and water sectors have been supported through a number of Dutch grant instruments, which aimed to accelerate development through the advantages of collaboration between the public and private sectors.

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.

Inclusive business is hailed as a win-win scenario for the development of smallholder farmers and poor communities; yet there is little insight into how these inclusive businesses work and, more importantly, for whom. This book aims for a thorough understanding of the range of inclusive businesses in agriculture by examining: the structures they implement, the actors involved, and whether they are effectively inclusive of smallholders. By offering a critical assessment of inclusive businesses overall, it allows for a better perception of what works where, and under which conditions. It provides useful insights that will benefit smallholders, agri-businesses, support groups, policy makers and investors who are willing to promote more inclusive businesses, that foster a better integration of smallholders into commercial value-chains and a more equitable and sustainable agricultural sector.

This report investigates barriers and solutions to scale for market-based approaches offering cleaner energy access to low-income customers in developing countries, for home and small scale productive uses. The objective is to learn from a selection of the most innovative and successful practitioners, representing solutions with high potential and innovation dynamics: solar lanterns, solar home systems, clean energy microgrids, solar irrigation pumps, and improved cook stoves.

This case study traces Evidence Action from origin to the launch and expansion of Dispensers for Safe Water in Uganda. It first describes the Dispensers’ pilot in eastern Uganda and then explore Evidence Action’s process of preparing for and scaling Dispensers across Uganda.

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.

The report predicts a major economic transformation for Africa and the need for a new economic growth model. It emphasizes the critical role of emerging technologies in helping Africa to overcome its old development challenges and to provide water security, low carbon energy security, food security, healthcare, education and financial inclusion at the BoP. As the most promising technologies to address those challenges Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Robotics and 3D Printing technology are identified.