This report explores evidence and insights from five case studies that have made significant recent progress in addressing the challenge of insuring poor smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the developing world. In India, national index insurance programmes have reached over 30 million farmers through a mandatory link with agricultural credit and strong government support. In East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania), the Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise (ACRE) has recently scaled to reach nearly 200,000 farmers, bundling index insurance with agricultural credit and farm inputs.

Forest resources share attributes with many other resource systems that make difficult their governance and management in a sustainable, efficient and equitable manner. Destruction or degradation of forest resources is most likely to occur in open-access forests where those involved, or external authorities, have not established effective governance. Conventional theories applied to forest resources presumed that forest users themselves were incapable of organizing to overcome the temptations to overharvest.

The Atankwidi Catchment, which lies in the White Volta Basin in West Africa, is intensively cultivated by locals for economic gains. During dry seasons, farmers irrigate their crops, chiefly tomatoes, using shallow groundwater harvested from shallow ponds they dig using simple tools like an axe, hoe, bucket and bowls. Recent expansion in cultivated areas has brought to the fore the need to estimate the volume of shallow groundwater stored in the catchment’s underlying aquifer and to what extent it can sustain the incremental growth in irrigated areas.

Study of sheep and goat production in tropical Africa, particularly animal numbers and production systems and regional geographic distribution & productivity potentials, w. outline of the need for future research on their potential performance under improved systems; data on adult body weight & production purposes; reproductive traits and mortality rates of small ruminants incl. price differences between mutton or goat meat and beef.

Despite emerging public and donor attention on women and agriculture, relatively few studies are based on gender analysis of sex-disaggregated quantitative data, particularly on women's involvement in marketing of livestock products. The objective of this article is therefore to investigate gender roles and processes of smallholder goat production and marketing in Inhassoro District, Mozambique, by analysing sex-disaggregated baseline data for women in male-headed households (W-MHH), men in male-headed households (M-MHH) and women in female-headed households (FHH).

Background

Excessive rainwater during the rainy season and lack of water in the dry season have been challenging the agricultural productivity and food security for rural communities in southern Mali. Various soil and water conservation practices were implemented in the past to improve crop yields and income, and reverse the effect of land degradation. However, none of these efforts looked into the potential use of shallow wells at a spatial scale to improve the agricultural productivity and hence the food security in the region.

Results