Publication database

As is the case elsewhere, in Africa, many people depend entirely on food systems for employment and incomes as well. For these reasons, building resilient and sustainable food systems is crucial to ensuring sustainable economies and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Agenda 2063 Goals. However, Africa remains food insecure, accounting for 256 million of the world’s 795 million people suffering from hunger. Against this challenge, this 2021 African Agriculture Status Report (AASR21) provides evidence and insights on the prospects of achieving resilience and sustainability in Africa’s food systems.

Research Paper #23 examines how uninsured risk constrains farmers in Northern Ghana. It shows that when provided with insurance against the primary catastrophic risk they face, farmers are able to increase expenditure on their farms and make riskier choices. The study finds a strong demand for insurance among these farmers. Insurance payouts further increase this demand in subsequent years both among recipients and among their social networks.

This report describes the design of a Behavioural Change Communications (BCC) campaign to promote improved cooking stoves in Kakuma town, Kakuma refugee camp and Kalobeyei Integrated Settlement, and the experiences and key learnings of the first six months of BCC campaign implementation (June to December 2021).

Fintech in Africa is evolving quickly. Today, there are hundreds of fintech startups across the continent – but how has the sector changed in recent years? This report takes a look at the next generation of fintech in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In the last few years droughts have been increasingly severe in Kenya. During 2011 alone, livestock pastoralists lost on average a third of their animals due to severe drought. The International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) has piloted a new way to protect them – livestock insurance using satellite technology.

UAB Vie offers a highly-trusted savings product to market traders in Burkina Faso. The daily, manual transactions were proving inefficient and prone to error and fraud. It therefore decided to equip each member of its sales staff with a mobile phone to record the transactions in real time. This brief reflects on the advantages and limitations of this technology upgrade.

Based on an analysis of the CGAP’s data from national surveys of smallholder households and smallholder diaries, this paper outlines the profile and needs of smallholder families and their various subgroups. Firstly, the paper looks at the relationship between financial activities and the different livelihood strategies employed by smallholder families. Further, it highlights the characteristics and behaviors that are common to large groups of smallholders, discusses how the overall market can be segmented most effectively, and presents a nuanced picture of the different types of smallholder households. Finally, the paper discusses opportunities available for various stakeholders serving smallholder families.

This Policy Brief summarises a literature review that explored the costs of various sanitation technologies.

As a consequence of climate change, agriculture in many parts of the world has become a riskier business activity. Given the dependence on agriculture in developing countries, this increased risk has a potentially dramatic effect on the lives of people throughout the developing world especially as it relates to their financial inclusion and sustainable access to capital. Research Paper #7 analyses the relationships between rainfall per crop gestation period and crop yields and studies the likelihood of crop yield losses. It makes recommendations on how this information could be used to develop a trigger for index insurance to help mitigate the financial risks to farmers and lenders who make loans to farmers in Ghana. The paper concludes by describing limitations and challenges that must be overcome in order to develop such risk management tools and by describing the potential for crop loss index insurance based on area crop yield in northern Ghana.