Can African smallholders farm themselves out of poverty?

Abstract

A great deal of research on agriculture in Africa is organised around the premise that intensification can take smallholder farmers out of poverty. The emphasis in programming often implicitly emphasizes focusing on farm productivity interventions and investments the go along with them.

Yet the returns to such technologies are not often evaluated within a whole-farm context. And -- critically -- the returns for smallholders with very little available land has not received sufficient attention.