The Dynamics of Agricultural Commercialisation, Diversification and Rural Change in Sub-Saharan Africa will be held at the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton on 3 October 2018
This half-day public seminar will involve researchers from the Agricultural Policy Research in Africa (APRA) Programme of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) and the Afrint Project of Lund University. They will present findings from two complementary multi-country panel studies examining different aspects of rural change and transformation linked to agricultural commercialisation and livelihood diversification.
The first part of the seminar will involve presentations from the Afrint team, who have been tracking changes in the livelihoods of nearly 2,000 small farmers through three rounds of research (2002, 2008 and 2013) in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia.
The Afrint survey data reveals increases in agricultural production, as well as commercialisation, among the sampled households, but also increasing polarisation of agricultural resources, with better-off farmers and male landholders responding to market improvements by increasing their farm sizes. The research also confirms growing gender gaps in access to agrarian resources and shows that female landholders often have poorer access to male labour.
The second part of the seminar will involve presentations from future agricultures researchers drawing on their findings from the first round of a new set of panel studies carried out under APRA in 2017-18 in Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, involving more than 4,000 small and medium-scale farming households. They will highlight emerging lessons linked to a common set of ‘outcome indicators’ on agricultural commercialisation, poverty and inequality, women’s empowerment, labour and employment, and food and nutrition security.
A panel session will follow the Afrint and APRA presentations, along with an open plenary to discuss the findings and policy implications of this research.
The final part of the day will involve the formal launch of a new Afrint book on agriculture, diversification and gender in rural Africa as well as relevant Future Agricultures outputs, including a new set of APRA working papers.
