We conducted a preliminary value chain actors mapping for major crops grown and livestock kept by smallholder farmers in Mbire and Murehwa districts of Zimbabwe. Accordingly, in this report we mapped value chain actors for 11 crops and livestock commodities: namely, sorghum, cotton, sesame, maize, groundnut, sweet-potato, vegetables (tomato and onion), cattle, goats, poultry, and honey/beekeeping. Except sesame from Mbire, most of the crop and livestock commodities are channeled to the main markets in Harare and Marondera for Murehwa.

Climate models predict decreasing precipitation and increasing air temperature, causing concern for the future of cocoa in the major producing regions worldwide. It has been suggested that shade could alleviate stress by reducing radiation intensity and conserving soil moisture, but few on-farm cocoa studies are testing this hypothesis.

Gender and Plant Health has often been seen as a very unusual combination, since two disciplines have a different epistemological orientation, use different languages, and have limited experience in working together.

This report summarizes the processes of developing the national fisheries and aquaculture policy in Nigeria in a 2-day consultation workshop with more than 63 stakeholders from the government ministries, nongovernmental and civil society organizations, research institutes, universities, and donors.

Taking advantage of Ghana’s gradual extension of cellphone towers in the early 2000s, we analyze the wealth effects of cellphone coverage expansion in a developing country setting using a difference-in-differences (event study) research design. We proxy local wealth using night-time light density over 1996–2016 and an asset ownership-based index from the 2000 and 2010 censuses. We find that cellphone coverage expansion significantly r raised wealth in Ghana. We then explore possible downstream effects of cellphone coverage expansion on electoral outcomes.

For grain yield stability analysis, genotype by environment interactions are crucial in properly identifying and discriminating between varieties and locations.

Efficient conservation and subsequent utilization of genetic resources are primarily dependent on the strength in the assessment of variation among geno-types. An experiment was carried out aiming at determining the extent of pheno-typic variability present in a panel of 320 barley genotypes and identifying candidate lines for further evaluation in improvement programs and successive utilization. It was conducted at two locations in Ethiopia, Aris Negelle and Holetta in the 2017/18 and 2018/19 cropping seasons.

Quantifying the welfare benefits of climate information services (CIS), which provide farmers with weather forecast information and advice can be empirically challenging, given farmers' agricultural investment may increase or decrease depending on the content of the forecast and their levels of risk aversion. In this paper, we quantify the benefits of CIS in terms of the extent that forecast information is able to align a farmer's agricultural investments to those that they would have chosen if they had known the weather realization with full certainty.

Farm typologies are often used to reduce the complexity in categorising diverse farming systems, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The resulting typologies can then be used in multiple ways including designing efficient sampling schemes that capture the diversity in smallholder farms, prescribing the selection of certain farm types to which interventions can be targeted or upscaled, or to give context into derived relationships. However, the construction of farm typologies consists of many subjective decisions that are not always obvious or evident to the end-user.

Agronomic gain key performance indicators (KPIs) are designed to monitor, evaluate and measure the impact of changes in agronomic practices in the CGIAR Excellence in Agronomy initiative (EiA). The current KPIs cover land productivity and its stability, resource use efficiency and soil health (Table 1; Saito et al., 2021). It is expected that the KPIs will be used across geographies, farming systems, and research and development (R&D) stages to deliver a greater depth of understanding of agronomic gain than has ever been achieved before.