African governments and international
development groups see boosting productivity on smallholder
farms as key to reducing rural poverty and safeguarding the
food security of farming and non-farming households.
Prompting smallholder farmers to use more fertilizer has
been a key tactic. Closing the productivity gap between male
and female farmers has been another avenue toward achieving
the same goal. The results in this paper suggest the two are

Since the early 2000s, Tanzania has seen
remarkable economic growth and strong resilience to external
shocks. Yet these achievements were overshadowed by the slow
response of poverty to the growing economy. Until 2007, the
poverty rate in Tanzania remained stagnant at around 34
percent despite a robust growth at an annualized rate of
approximately 7 percent. This apparent disconnect between
growth and poverty reduction has raised concerns among

Women comprise 50 percent of the
agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, but manage
plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less
productive. As a source of income inequality and aggregate
productivity loss, the country-specific magnitude and
drivers of this gender gap are of great interest. Using
national data from the Uganda National Panel Survey for
2009/10 and 2010/11, the gap before controlling for

This Botswana Agriculture Public
Expenditure Review (AgPER) is one of a series of similar
studies undertaken in over a dozen countries in sub-Saharan
Africa under the framework of a program coordinated by
CAADP, supported by the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and
the CAADP Multi-Donor Trust Fund, and implemented by the
World Bank. The AgPER presents data about actual expenditure
for the period 2000 to 2013, with an outlook on the

Recognizing the importance and
uniqueness of the Sundarbans, the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
declared the Indian portion of the forest a World Heritage
Site in 1987, and the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Program
has included the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve in the Global
Network of Island and Coastal Biosphere Reserves
Contributing to Action on Climate Change and Sustainable

Is Africa's rural economy
transforming as its economies grow? This paper uses
comparable income aggregates from 41 national household
surveys from 22 countries to explore the extent of income
diversification among rural households in Sub-Saharan
Africa, and to look at how income diversification in
Sub-Saharan Africa compares with other regions, taking into
account differences in levels of development. The paper also

This paper uses the recently collected
Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on
Agriculture Initiative data sets from five countries in
Sub-Saharan Africa to provide a comprehensive overview of
land and labor market participation by agrarian households
and to formally test for failures in factor markets. Under
complete and competitive markets, households can solve their
consumption and production problems separately, so that

This paper quantifies the impact of
inundation risk and salinization on the family structure and
economic welfare of coastal households in Bangladesh. These
households are already on the "front line" of
climate change, so their adaptation presages the future for
hundreds of millions of families worldwide who will face
similar threats by 2100. The analysis is based on a
household decision model that relates spatial deployment of

In a changing climate, saltwater
intrusion is expected to worsen in low-lying coastal areas
around the world. Understanding the physical and economic
effects of salinity ingress, and planning adaptation, are
key to the long-term development of countries for which sea
level rise has been identified as a major risk from climate
change. This paper presents a study conducted in Bangladesh,
which quantifies the prospective relationship between

In 2002, the producer company model
emerged to benefit poor farmers in India. This smart lesson,
based on the World Bank's growing experience with
producer companies in India, builds on lessons learned from
the first and second Madhya Pradesh district poverty
initiatives projects, which initiated 18 agriculture and
livestock companies, involving 46,500 poor small farmers in
over 1,550 villages in 14 districts - with 100 percent women

In countries such as Azerbaijan, the
risks of climate change for the agricultural sector are a
particularly immediate and important problem because the
majority of the rural population depends either directly or
indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. The need to
adapt to climate change in all sectors is now on the agenda
of the countries and development partners. International
efforts to limit greenhouse gases and to mitigate climate

Bangladesh, with two-thirds of its land
area less than five meters above sea level, is one of the
most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. Low-lying
coastal districts along the Bay of Bengal are particularly
vulnerable to sea level rise, tidal flooding, storm surges,
and climate-induced increases in soil and water salinity.
This paper investigates the impact of drinking water
salinity on infant mortality in coastal Bangladesh. It