Download or read book Leveraging urbanization for inclusive development in Malawi Anchoring the secondary city development of Salima and Chipoka in a modernizing fruit value chain written by De Weerdt, Joachim and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2023-06-16 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural development in Malawi faces an important conundrum. While agriculture is the backbone of the economy, many smallholders will not be able to farm their way out of poverty. Shrinking farmland size severely limits the total income that can be earned from farming, even at much higher levels of productivity per area farmed than are now achieved. Urbanization embedded in the modernization of locally relevant value chains provides a promising pathway to inclusive development as it serves to simultaneously raise farm incomes, create income-earning opportunities off the farm, and create specialized urban hubs that can boost urban economic growth through agglomeration economies. After laying out these concepts conceptually, we apply them to a specific example of a modernizing mango value chain in Salima/Chipoka. Salima and Chipoka form an urban cluster about 100 km from the capital Lilongwe, located on the lakeshore of Lake Malawi. The Malawi Secondary Cities Plan has identified this cluster as one of eight that are to form an interconnected network of secondary cities, geographically spread across the country, with productive activities in each anchored in the economy of their rural hinterlands
Download or read book Malawi Urbanization Review written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Malawi Urbanization Review written by Weltbank and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Malawi Urbanization Review aims to provide fresh perspectives on urbanization in Malawi, by analyzing the current and potential contribution of urbanization to long-term national development and the current institutional and financial capacity of local governments to manage the process. Analyses presented in this report are particularly timely as Malawi is planning for the coming half decade through the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy (MGDS) III (2016-2020). Malawi is urbanizing at a moderate rate and has a good chance of proactively managing the urbanization process. Opportunities may arise from a positive structural change that Malawi's economy is undergoing, whereby the driver of growth and job creation moves from agriculture to non-agricultural sectors. Faster urbanization, with strong linkages with rural areas, can contribute further to deepening such structural change. To unlock the potential of urbanization as a catalyst for long-term economic development, it is necessary to strengthen the capacity of urban local governments to generate revenues and meet the key infrastructure and service needs in urban areas, which remain challenging even at the current rate of urbanization.
Download or read book It takes two Women s empowerment in agricultural value chains in Malawi written by Ragasa, Catherine and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-03-03 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inclusive agricultural value chains (VCs) are potential drivers for poverty reduction, food security, and women’s empowerment. This report assesses the implementation of the Agricultural Technical and Vocational Education Training for Women Program (ATVET4Women) that aims to support women with vocational training and market linkages in priority agricultural value chains. This report focuses on Malawi, one of the six pilot countries of the ATVET4Women; and focuses on vegetable value chains in which some non-formal training sessions have been conducted as of October 2019. This report presents (1) program experience of stakeholders; (2) evidence of program benefits and challenges among ATVET4Women non-formal training graduates; and (3) baseline data on value chain and empowerment indicators, using a pilot household survey-based instrument for measuring women’s empowerment in agricultural value chains (pro-WEAI for market inclusion) and supplementary qualitative research. Results show graduates’ satisfaction and appreciation of the training provided, and some graduates reported having access to more lucrative markets as a result of the training. However, positive changes in several outcome indicators were reported by only some graduates: 30 percent of graduates reported increased production and sales. There is no significant difference in the reported changes and levels of vegetable production and income between graduates and non-graduates. Qualitative findings suggest that constraints to accessing agricultural inputs and funds to upgrade their production may be why there are no measured differences. Results on empowerment status reveal that 73 percent of women and 85 percent of men in the sample are empowered, and 73 percent of the sample households achieved gender parity. The main contributor of disempowerment among women and men is lack of work balance and autonomy in income. Fewer women achieved adequacy in work balance than men. Adequacies in attitudes about domestic violence, respect among household members, input in productive decisions, and asset ownership are generally high for both women and men, but significantly lower for women. While this report is mainly descriptive and further analysis is ongoing, it offers some lessons and practical implications for improving ATVET4Women program implementation and its outcomes on women’s market access, incomes, and empowerment.
Download or read book Malawi National Urban Profile written by and published by . This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Malawi Economic Growth Strategy written by Malawi. Ministry of Economic Planning and Development and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Malawi written by International Monetary Fund and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2012-08-03 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Malawi Growth and Development Strategy II (MGDS-II) is a poverty reduction strategy for the period 2006–11, which is aimed at fulfilling Malawi’s future developmental aspiration—Vision 2020. The strategy identifies broad thematic areas and key priority areas to bring about sustained economic growth. A striking feature of this strategy is that the various governmental organizations, private sector, and general public are equal stakeholders. However, successful implementation of MGDS-II will largely depend on sound macroeconomic management and a stable political environment.
Download or read book The African Storyteller written by Harold Scheub and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Africa written by United Nations Environment Programme and published by UNEP/Earthprint. This book was released on 2008 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This stunning 400-page Atlas is a unique and powerful publication which brings to light stories of environmental change at more than 100 locations spread across every country in Africa. There are more than 300 satellite images, 300 ground photographs and 150 maps, along with informative graphs and charts that give a vivid visual portrayal of Africa and its changing environment that provide scientific evidence of the impact that natural and human activities have had on the continent's environment over the past several decades. The observations and measurements of environmental change help gauge the extent of progress made by African countries towards reaching the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. More importantly, this book contributes to the knowledge and understanding that are essential for adaptation and remediation, and should be of immense value to all those who want to know more about Africa and who care about the future of this continent.
Download or read book Civic Education Culture written by Bradley C. S. Watson and published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This book was released on 2005 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What do we teach our citizens? This great Platonic question is as crucial today as it has ever been. America and the West come to terms with this question in the context of their richly diverse, technologically sophisticated, fundamentally individualistic societies. Virtually all would agree that such diversity, sophistication, and freedom are positive political and cultural goods, but many would also argue that they militate against the coherence that all regimes and civilizations must, in some way, demand. The nature, extent, and coherence of civic education are perhaps the greatest determinants of a regime's politics and culture, and the regime can in turn do much to foster the right kind of civic education. This book presents the insights of renowned scholars and writers, including Stephen H. Balch, Timothy Fuller, and Roger Kimball, who have thought broadly and deeply about the role that education at all levels plays in promoting, maintaining, or undermining our politics, culture, and society.
Download or read book The impact of Ethiopia s direct seed marketing approach on smallholders access to seeds productivity and commercialization written by Mekonnen, Dawit Kelemework and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-01-27 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Several factors contribute to the low level of improved variety use in Ethiopia. Among those, on the supply side, is the limited availability of seed in the volumes, quality, and timeliness required by farmers, which is partly a result of limited public and private investment in the sector. Beginning in 2011, the Government of Ethiopia introduced a novel experiment-the Direct Seed Marketing (DSM) approach-to reduce some of the centralized, state-run attributes of the country’s seed market and rationalize the use of public resources. DSM was designed to incentivize private and public seed producers to sell seed directly to farmers rather than through the state apparatus. This study is the first quantitative evaluation of DSM’s impact on indicators of a healthy seed system: access to quality seeds, on-farm productivity, and market participation of smallholders. Using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach, the study finds that DSM led to a 26 percent increase in maize yields and a 5 percent increase in the share of maize harvest sold. DSM also led to improvements in seed availability for all three of Ethiopia’s major cereals: maize, wheat, and teff. However, DSM’s effects on yields and share of harvest sold are not statistically significant for wheat and teff. These crop-specific differences in performance are likely explainable by biological differences between hybrid maize and openly pollinated varieties of wheat and teff that incentivize private sector participation in maize seed markets over wheat and teff seed markets. These differences demand different policies and perhaps even institutional approaches to accelerating adoption between hybrids and OPVs.
Download or read book Energy Harvesting and Energy Efficiency written by Nicu Bizon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents basic and advanced concepts for energy harvesting and energy efficiency, as well as related technologies, methods, and their applications. The book provides up-to-date knowledge and discusses the state-of-the-art equipment and methods used for energy harvesting and energy efficiency, combining theory and practical applications. Containing over 200 illustrations and problems and solutions, the book begins with overview chapters on the status quo in this field. Subsequent chapters introduce readers to advanced concepts and methods. In turn, the final part of the book is dedicated to technical strategies, efficient methods and applications in the field of energy efficiency, which also makes it of interest to technicians in industry. The book tackles problems commonly encountered using basic methods of energy harvesting and energy efficiency, and proposes advanced methods to resolve these issues. All the methods proposed have been validated through simulation and experimental results. These “hot topics” will continue to be of interest to scientists and engineers in future decades and will provide challenges to researchers around the globe as issues of climate change and changing energy policies become more pressing. Here, readers will find all the basic and advanced concepts they need. As such, it offers a valuable, comprehensive guide for all students and practicing engineers who wishing to learn about and work in these fields.
Download or read book Agriculture and youth in Nigeria Aspirations challenges constraints and resilience written by ElDidi, Hagar and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2020-07-03 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigeria’s rural youth are facing various challenges in agriculture, with limited job opportunities outside the sector. Using qualitative focus group discussions and individual interviews with youth in four communities in two Nigerian states, the paper reflects on nuanced differences in perceptions of opportunities, coping mechanisms and overall resilience of youth in rural Nigeria, as well as differential access to information, inputs and irrigation based on age, gender and community. We apply the GCAN framework, to illustrate the factors that shape resilience pathways in the context of climate change and other shocks and stressors. Many of the constraints rural youth face are faced by other groups, including lack of finance, farm inputs and modern equipment for production and processing. Yet, youth face higher and specific hurdles related to lack of capital, experience and a strong social capital and networks that would facilitate coping with climatic and other shocks and improving their livelihoods. Young women in particular have less access to information and irrigation, and are less likely to benefit from cooperative memberships. Nevertheless, young men and women have higher resilience compared to older groups in terms of health, mobility and ability to migrate, as well as easier access to the internet as a source of information. Youth can better build resilience and a network and receive government assistance when part of a cooperative. Nevertheless, a larger enabling environment in the sector is needed, to improve roads, access to markets, information, inputs and equipment to support young farmers who cannot leave the agriculture sector. A promising factor is that many young men and women realize the importance of agriculture and aspire to become successful in the sector.
Download or read book Effects of COVID 19 restrictions on mechanization service providers and mechanization Equipment retailers Insights from phone surveys in Myanmar written by Takeshima, Hiroyuki and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: COVID-19 continues to plague global food security not only directly through health effects but also indirectly through responses that restrict key economic functions of the agri-food sector. De-spite the growing literature on the effects of COVID-19 on the agri-food sector, evidence on cer-tain players like mechanization service providers (MSP) and mechanization equipment retailers (MER) remain scarce. This study provides insights into the effects of COVID-19 restrictions on MSP and MER in Myanmar, where the majority of MSP and MER are relatively new and poten-tially vulnerable to these economic shocks, using an unbalanced panel data from five rounds of phone surveys. We find that direct responses to COVID-19 involving movement restrictions, as well as disruptions in the market that led to increased cost and reduced availability of machinery and equipment, and growing financial challenges, had significantly negative effects on revenue prospects, service delivery, sales of machines and equipment by MSE and MER. Our analyses based on rare multi-round surveys during a single production season also reveal important dy-namics in MSP’s decision-making; negative revenue prospects at particular period can further hurt revenue prospects in subsequent periods, which is consistent with the hypotheses that agents like MSP who had incurred significant sunk-cost in machines can engage in more desperate and thus potentially suboptimal business practice to recover the sunk-cost. This may result in a vi-cious cycle of declining revenues in the future in the face of shocks like COVID-19. Overall, evi-dence suggests that, policies to minimize movement restrictions, various financial support, and mitigate any pessimism at the beginning of production season are all important to make sure MSP and MER continue to function effectively during the COVID-19 pandemic that persists in 2021.
Download or read book A review of the Ghana Planting for Food and Jobs program 2017 2020 Implementation impact and further analysis written by Pauw, Karl and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report examines the evolution of farm input subsidy programs in Ghana, with a focus on the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ) initiative, which was introduced in 2017 and replaced the Fertilizer Subsidy Program (FSP) that was launched in 2008. A review of PFJ implementation reports and other official data sources reveal that information on general program features, such as beneficiary numbers, subsidized input quantities, and program budget is readily available and useful for understanding program design and implementation. National crop production estimates are also reported annually, and these provide evidence of rapid output growth in the agricultural sector, especially within the cereals subsector. However, the implementing agency, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), lacks a system for closely monitoring and reporting PFJ program impacts at farm-level. Consequently, most of the published information on the marginal contribution of PFJ to national crop output is based on simulations, which make strong assumptions about seeding rates, fertilizer use by crop, and input use efficiency on beneficiary farms. With this drawback in mind, these simulations show that PFJ contributed substantially to crop output growth, a result which is not implausible considering the quantities of inputs provided, but one that requires further on-farm validation. Recommendations are offered around beneficiary targeting, interpretation of employment impacts, and the need for regular monitoring of farm-level impacts, all of which will help improve transparency of the program.
Download or read book Impacts of COVID 19 on food security Panel data evidence from Nigeria written by Amare, Mulubrhan and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper combines pre-pandemic face-to-face survey data with follow up phone surveys collected in April-May 2020 to quantify the overall and differential impacts of COVID-19 on household food security, labor market participation and local food prices in Nigeria. We exploit spatial variation in exposure to COVID-19 related infections and lockdown measures along with temporal differences in our outcomes of interest using a difference-in-difference approach. We find that those households exposed to higher COVID-19 cases or mobility lockdowns experience a significant increase in measures of food insecurity. Examining possible transmission channels for this effect, we find that COVID-19 significantly reduces labor market participation and increases food prices. We find that impacts differ by economic activities and households. For instance, lockdown measures increased households' experience of food insecurity by 12 percentage points and reduced the probability of participation in non-farm business activities by 13 percentage points. These lockdown measures have smaller impacts on wage-related activities and farming activities. In terms of food security, households relying on non-farm businesses, poorer households, those with school-aged children, and those living in remote and conflicted-affected zones have experienced relatively larger deteriorations in food insecurity. These findings can help inform immediate and medium-term policy responses, including social protection policies aiming at ameliorating the impacts of the pandemic, as well as guide targeting strategies of governments and international donor agencies by identifying the most impacted sub-populations.
Download or read book Monitoring the impact of COVID 19 in Myanmar Yangon peri urban poultry farmers Early July 2020 survey round written by Fang, Peixun and published by Intl Food Policy Res Inst. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 9 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poultry farmers in Myanmar were originally interviewed by telephone in early and late June 2020 to determine how their businesses were being affected by COVID-19 related restrictions. The results of those surveys were published in Myanmar Strategy Support Program Policy Notes 11 and 13, respectively. To trace the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their economic activities, a third phone survey of poultry farmers was done in early July 2020. The third survey included 247 poultry farmers (177 broiler and 70 layer farms) in the Yangon peri-urban area (Ayeyarwady, Bago, and Yangon regions) who had been interviewed for the second round of the survey. The same survey questionnaire was used. This Policy Note reports on the results of the third survey round.