Publication database

This 2019 edition of Africa’s Development Dynamics explores policies for productive transformation in Africa. It proposes three main policy focus for transforming firms: providing business services to clusters of firms; developing regional production networks; and improving exporting firms’ ability to thrive in fast-changing markets.

Commendable progress has been made across many parts of Africa over the past years to increase agricultural productivity, reduce hunger, malnutrition, and poverty, create new employment opportunities for young people and improve the livelihoods of rural communities. Yet, demographic change, urbanization, shifting diets and climatic changes mean that pressure is growing on food systems to make more food and more varied and nutritious food available and accessible.  How African countries position themselves to harness and deploy digital technologies will determine the future competitiveness of African agriculture and its contribution to African economies.

The current report — Byte by byte: policy innovation for transforming Africa’s food system with digital technologies— summarizes the key findings of a systematic analysis of what seven African countries at the forefront of progress on digitalization of the agriculture sector have done right. It analyzes which institutional and policy innovations were implemented and which actions by the private sector and agtech start-ups were taken to increase the development and use of digital tools and services in the agriculture value chain. The objective of this report is to identify interventions that work and benefit farmers and other actors in the value chain and recommend options for policy and program innovation that allow countries to develop a digitalization ecosystem in which digital technologies and services can be developed and used to foster growth and competitiveness in Africa’s agriculture value chains. 

An important part of understanding the growth prospects of an economy comes from understanding the constraints to business growth and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the data in this area is scarce in East Africa.This project aims to collect systematic regular data directly from a large sample of entrepreneurs from small firms in two East African countries to fill this data gap. These data will form the first step in a broader research agenda on small firm growth.

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.

How can the government promote Inclusive Business (IB) and Impact Investing (II) in Nigeria? This report makes four major policy recommendations: institutionalising support, promoting awareness, creating a financing structure, and putting in place a coordinated stimulus implementation strategy. In addition, it provides an overview on the present landscape for IB and II in Nigeria.

Inclusive businesses (IBs), embodying partnerships between commercial agribusinesses and smallholder farmers/low-income communities, are considered to contribute towards rural development and agricultural sector transformation. Structured as complex organizational setups consisting of, and overcoming the limitations of, standard inclusive instruments, they allow for the inclusion of smallholders and low-income communities into commercial agricultural value chains. This publication explores if the commercial sector, through IB partnerships, contributes towards the government's transformation and developmental objectives

This study by INCLUDE captures current views of inclusive development challenges in Africa, and identifies key interventions to reduce poverty and inequality in the region. It explains why addressing inequality matters for development on the long run and provides a definition of inclusive development: “Inclusive development is achieved when improvements are realized in the income and non-income dimensions of development and inequalities in these dimensions fall.”

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.