There are 85 irrigation schemes in Niger that cover around 16,000 ha and are cultivated by 40,000 farmers. The informal status of these irrigation schemes, and their occupants, has created problems due to population growth and the increasing scarcity of natural resources. Holders of traditional land rights have challenged government decisions concerning land attributions and property rights within the schemes, and have occasionally prevented construction from proceeding.

Le Niger compte aujourd’hui 85 aménagements hydro-agricoles (AHA), qui s’étendent sur environ 16 000 hectares et font travailler plus de 40 000 exploitants.  Avec la pression démographique et la raréfaction des ressources naturelles disponibles pour l’activité agricole, l’informalité de la gestion du foncier des AHA et du statut des personnes qui les exploitent est devenue problématique.

With Second Level Land Certification (SLLC), farmers gain increased security of tenure: this incentivises them to invest more in their land.

To allow for this productive investment to take place, the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) programme is working with micro finance institutions (MFIs) to roll out an innovative financial product: the SLLC-linked individual loan.

Accessing longer terms and larger size loans allows farmers to increase the productivity of their land, graduate from subsistence farming, and become more commercially oriented.

How LIFT promotes formalisation
 

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Ethiopia are offering farmers a new financial product: the SLLC-linked individual loan product

With Second Level Land Certification (SLLC), MFIs have the security of knowing the ownership and exact landholding size of farmers. This has allowed the development of an innovative individual lending product that uses the produce of the land as a form of guarantee.

Supporting the agriculture sector

The GoE with technical support from the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) programme is issuing Second Level Land Certificates (SLLC) to increase the land tenure security of farmers. As a result, farmers are more willing to invest in their land in a productive and sustainable way. However, to allow for increased productive investment, farmers must have access to improved agri-inputs and technologies that are climate smart: this is currently a challenge in most rural areas.

This is a report from a workshop organised by the Southern Africa Food LAB (SAFL) in collabora?on with Solidaridad Southern Africa, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) to develop a set of entry level standard principles; and an integrated environmental, ethical, and social market standard for smallholder farmers.

The overarching aim of the study was to identify ways through which smallholder farmers could be supported to enter the sector.

The objectives of the project were to:

This document provides an introduction to the Smallholder Farmer Market Segmentation Toolkit produced by the National Agricultural Marketing Council (NAMC) and the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL) during 2014 and 2015.

This research report contains an overview of two innovations that form part of a project called Supporting Smallholder Agriculture (SSA) conducted by the Southern Africa Food Lab (SAFL). The two innovations documented in this report simultaneously investigated market segmentation and standards - related challenges among smallholder farmers in two parts of the country.

Extension services are a keystone of information diffusion in agriculture. This paper exploits a large randomized controlled trial to track diffusion of a new technique in the classic Training and Visit (T&V) extension model, relative to a more direct training model. In both control and treatment communities, contact farmers (CFs) serve as points-of-contacts between agents and other farmers. The intervention (Treatment) aims to address two pitfalls of the T&V model: i) infrequent extension agent visits, and ii) poor quality information.

This study aims to achieve a better understanding of the agricultural risk and risk management situation in Tanzania with a view to identifying key solutions to reduce current gross domestic product (GDP) growth volatility. For the purpose of this assessment, risk is defined as the probability that an uncertain event will occur that can potentially produce losses to participants along the supply chain.