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.

In the past 50 years, Indian agriculture has undergone a major transformation, from dependence on food aid to becoming a consistent net food exporter. The gradual reforms in the agricultural sector (following the broader macro-reforms of the early 1990s) spurred some unprecedented innovations and changes in the food sector driven by private investment. These impressive achievements must now be viewed in light of the policy and investment imperatives that lie ahead.

This report focuses on areas with highest potential efficiency gains to increase the value for money from investments in core public goods and services such as extension, irrigation and rural roads. This is a first attempt to carry out such an analysis in Cambodia, and even in the Greater Mekong sub-region. Based on extensive data gathering and surveys, this chapter analyzes the efficiency and effectiveness of agricultural sector expenditures in Cambodia and assesses various options for increasing the impact of government expenditures on agricultural growth.

This report shows that while more inclusive growth is the ultimate solution to poverty in Lesotho, the country can and should use selective social transfers to reduce poverty more rapidly among the extreme poor. But because the majority of the transfers are received by people who are not among the extreme poor there is room for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of spending on safety nets which. These programs should be productive and concentrate on the extreme poor Basotho.

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.