The use of mobile phones has increased rapidly in many developing countries, including in rural areas. Besides reducing the costs of communication and improving access to information, mobile phones are an enabling technology for other innovations. One important example are mobile phone based money transfers, which could be very relevant for the rural poor, who are often underserved by the forma...

A prospective cohort study was conducted in five purposively-sampled agro-ecological zone (AEZ)-grazing system strata in Murang'a District, Kenya, between March 1995 and June 1996. The study strata were selected based on a preliminary characterization study to represent the widest range of risks to East Coast fever (ECF) in the District and included zero-grazing and open-grazing farms. In total...

Cotton is one of the most important smallholder cash crops in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). How to ensure input supply, credit recovery and competition is a subject of intense policy debate. This paper examines the performance of cotton sector development policies in Mozambique and Zambia. Both countries face the challenge of organizing input supply to farmers in the absence of rural credit markets...

Antibiotic resistance patterns of bacterial isolates from both quarter teat-tip swabs and their quarter milk samples were evaluated in smallholder dairy farms in northern Thailand with excessive use of antibiotics (HIGH) compared with normal use (NORM). Results from teat-tip swab samples showed that the percentage of Bacillus spp. resistance to overall antibiotics was significantly lower in the...

Innovation platforms are established to facilitate open communication and collaboration among various actors usually within a value chain to promote collective resource management. The concept of innovation platform as a strategy of entry point for operationalization, validation and dissemination of agricultural technology have received much attention in recent times among researchers in Ghana....

The study was performed in Khartoum state the capital of the Sudan where dairy farm producers were the target of the study, the study aimed at the economical assessment of the production profile of small dairy farms .Objectives of the study included: assessing cost-effectiveness and sustainability for domestic milk production in relation with the socioeconomic characteristics of smallholders; a...

T he average smallholder farmer in Malawi is tasked to feed a family of five on a farm of less than one hectare in size (NSO, 2008). The intensification of land through, for example, fertilizer use plays a prominent role in Malawi’s policy to increase the productivity potential of smallholder farmers. With the population almost doubling in the last twenty years (NSO, 2008), additional measures ...

The agent-structure binary in human-environment relations has historically ascribed primacy to either decisionmaking agents or political-economic structures as the anthropogenic force driving landscape change. This binary has, in part, separated cultural and political ecology, despite important research weaving structure and agency in each of these and related subfields. The implications of app...

While agricultural practices are widely reported to contribute to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, there are only limited measurements available for emission rates in the monsoon climate of the African continent. We conducted a scoping study to measure nitrous oxide (N2O-N) and methane (CH4) emission rates from 24 plots constructed on smallholder agricultural farms along the slope ...

Smallholder farmers rely on labor exchange to generate agricultural work when cash is rare and credit unavailable. Reciprocal altruism, biased by genetic kinship, has been implicated as the mechanism responsible for labor exchange; however, few empirical tests confirm this proposition. Competitive altruism could be operating if people differ in ability and use this information as a criterion fo...