Impossible to have imagined 50 years ago that Africa’s ruling political elites would have come to despise their own small-scale farmers and pastoralists and to look kindly on foreign-run large plantations. Impact of decades of structural adjustment programmes forgotten. Sceptical about claims that land grabs can be stopped within 3 years. Looks at variety of responses attempting to address power inequalities at local levels. Research a not unproblematic area. Concludes with case studies of legal empowerment in Mozambique and Namati’s community land protection programme.

The objective of this review is to
synthesize existing evaluative evidence and generate new
evidence on the quality of the Results Frameworks (RFs) of
development policy operations (DPOs). The study is organized
around a number of evaluative questions on various aspects
of DPO design, implementation, reporting, and evaluation.
Its focus is on the quality of RF, taking objectives and
coverage for granted. The study does not cover the scope and

It is widely acknowledged that goats in developing countries fulfill multiple functions and can contribute to improved livelihoods of smallholders. The multi-functionality of goats in rural Mozambique however is fairly unknown. The objective of the paper is therefore to identify and create a deeper understanding of the multiple functions goats currently play in the smallholders sector in Mozambique. The paper takes a sociological approach by advancing the thinking that the functions of goats are socially and culturally constructed, and not ‘given’.

Catastrophe risk models are quantitative
models used to estimate probabilistic loss distributions for
a specified range of assets subject to a baseline level of
disaster risk. While cat risk models are used extensively by
the insurance and reinsurance industry to estimate expected
losses to insured assets, their ability to estimate damages
outside of a narrow range of physical assets such as
buildings or infrastructure is still limited. This paper

The 2007/08 commodity price boom
triggered a ‘rush’ for land in developing countries. Yet,
many affected countries lacked the regulatory infrastructure
to cope with such demand and reliable data on investors’
performance. This study uses the example of Ethiopia to show
how simple improvements in administrative data collection
can help to address this by (i) allowing assessment of the
productivity of land use and taking measures to increase it;

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land

This paper disentangles different
aspects of land fragmentation and its impact on the
efficiency of resource use. The paper uses information on
the incidence of crop shocks to assess whether fragmentation
provides benefits in reducing risk and parcel coordinates
and terrain-adjusted travel times between parcels to more
precisely account for the associated costs in 2010/11 data
from Rwanda. While fragmentation increases the time required

The contribution of women to labor in
African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60
to 80 percent. Using individual-disaggregated, plot-level
labor input data from nationally representative household
surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study
estimates the average female labor share in crop production
at 40 percent. It is slightly above 50 percent in Malawi,
Tanzania, and Uganda, and substantially lower in Nigeria (37

Africa is estimated to have great
potential for agricultural production, but there are a
number of constraints inhibiting the development of that
potential. Spatial data are increasingly important in the
realization of potential as well as the associated
constraints. With crop production data generated at 5-minute
spatial resolution, the paper applies the spatial tobit
regression model to estimate the possible impacts of

Rice is one of the major crops cultivated predominantly in flooded paddies, thus
a large amount of water is consumed during its growing season. Accurate paddy rice maps
are therefore important inputs for improved estimates of actual evapotranspiration in the
agricultural landscape. The main objective of this study was to obtain flooded paddy rice
maps using multi-temporal images of Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer
(MODIS) in the Krishna River Basin, India. First, ground-based spectral samples collected

Launched in 2011, the Second Sustainable
and Participatory Energy Management Project (PROGEDE II) for
Senegal has been hailed for effectively mainstreaming a
gender perspective into an energy project. Under the
project, women have participated more in decision making;
developed skills in technical production, entrepreneurship,
and organizational management; and benefitted from increased incomes.