• Agriculture for development

Agriculture for development

In order to increase the impact of poverty reduction programmes, development practitioners are increasingly attempting to understand the reasons why particular communities and individuals are able to escape from poverty, while others are not. This kind of research is most insightful when it is focuses on pathways out of poverty under particularly trying circumstances. In this context, new research published in the Journal of Development Studies now examines how some villagers in the Kagera region of Tanzania have managed to move out of poverty in spite of the odds.

Tanzania's Kagera region is characteristic of many landlocked parts of Africa that are largely dependent on agriculture, and its population is ethnically diverse. Following agricultural liberalisation in the late 1980s, the farmers of Kagera have diversified both within agriculture and by moving into new non-agricultural income-generating activities. This diversification follows decades of increasing monetisation of the economy and the gradual disappearance of the subsistence farmer.

The study combines a quantitative 10-year panel data set of 47 rural villages in Kagera with qualitative data on a subset of eight villages in order to identify a sample of households that have managed to move out of poverty and contrasts them with those that have not.

It finds that:

• households that have diversified their farming activities, growing food crops for their own consumption, cash crops for sale, and keeping livestock, have found it easiest to escape from poverty
• households involved in business and trade have also been successful, though this option has only been open to households in better-connected villages with initial endowments of land and other wealth
• good health and extensive trust networks have helped households move out of poverty
• illness and agricultural shocks have important negative effects on everyone, except the most well-off

The study concludes that landlocked and agriculture-dependent regions like Kagera cannot expect to eliminate poverty all at once. Nonetheless, under the right conditions, households are themselves able to move out of poverty. Governments can help accelerate this process by:

• increasing poor people's access to ideas and networks
• improving credit facilities, roads and communication and investing in education
• protecting people from the financial strains associated with idiosyncratic illness shocks
• ensuring local compliance to national inheritance laws, for the benefit of women and girls
• target specific interventions at people in remote areas with limited land and other assets 
  
  

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