Editorial PrEfacE The growing use of new generation, mobile-based, information and communication technologies (ICT) has expanded opportunities for food and agricultural marketing and rural financial service delivery among the smallholder farming community in Sub-Saharan Africa. Smallholder farmers in developing countries have struggled for many years under difficult conditions of poor access to...

Water scarcity is threatening social and economic growth in rural areas of developing countries. There are potential markets for water purification technologies in these regions. The main focus of this article is to evaluate the social, economic and political feasibilities of providing water purification technologies to rural areas of developing countries. The findings of this research can serv...

Poor access to agricultural market information is a major factor constraining the performance of agricultural markets in developing countries. The search for new strategies for resolving this constraint has led to several ICT-based market information service (MIS) projects in developing countries. At the same time, the rapid penetration of new generation ICT tools (especially mobile phones) has...

Rural finance strategy / [by Mark Wenner]. p.cm. (Sustainable Development Department Sector strategy papers series ; RUR-104) Includes bibilographical references. Foreword This document builds on Bank efforts over the past year to define a strategy to carry out the mandates of the Eighth Replenishment related to the development of rural financial markets. The 1994 Agreement for the Eighth Reple...

TO DATE, MOST development theory and practice have focused on either “urban” or “rural” issues with little consideration of the interrelations between the two. By contrast, several empirical studies show that the linkages between urban centres and the countryside, including movement of people, goods, capital and other social transactions, play an important role in processes of rural and urban c...

This short paper considers the poverty impacts of livelihood diversification and the potential challenges of creating a pro-poor rural non-farm economy (RNFE). Rural diversification can be defined as economic development of non-agricultural activities or a livelihood which has multiple, part-time components. It can be associated with a booming or recessionary economy or with accumulating or imm...

A growing number of studies have shown that adequate spatial access to healthy foods leads to increased fresh produce consumption and reduced risk of chronic diseases. Annual dynamics of spatial access to 1,539 vendors of fresh produce (including farmers markets and roadside farm stands) are analyzed in Massachusetts. Travel distance to the nearest fresh produce vendor was calculated for each c...

Many of the world's food-insecure and undernourished people are smallholder farmers in developing countries. This is especially true in Africa. There is an urgent need to make smallholder agriculture and food systems more nutrition-sensitive. African farm households are known to consume a sizeable part of what they produce at home. Less is known about how much subsistence agriculture actually c...

During 2007-10, failures eliminated 318 U.S. commercial banks and savings institutions, about 4 percent of the total number of banks operating at the end of 2006. The assets and deposits of many failed banks were acquired by institutions that already had offices in markets served by the failed banks. This article investigates the impact of in-market acquisitions of failed banks on the concentra...

eographic markets are currently defined by market analysts at each of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks, with oversight by the Federal Reserve Board and even the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1963, in U.S. v. Bank of Philadelphia, the Court ruled that the market for bank deposits is local. That 1963 ruling still unifies market analysis at each of the twelve Reserve Banks. The flavor of analysis differs...