Abstract This chapter synthesizes the discussion on tertiary agricultural education (TAE) in Africa, offering recommendations for transforming TAE systems and institutions. The chapter synthesizes the change process defined and explored throughout this volume, providing a review of the external environment, the components of internal transformation processes and the ways in which TAE entities can take advantage of different types of networks and partnerships.

This chapter examines ways in which an equal balance of power can be established in designing and implementing higher-education partnerships. The partnerships featured here are transnational - both within and outside Africa - so they typically have different academic structures, traditions and resources. The chapter presents an approach to partnership design and implementation with the intention of helping African tertiary agricultural education (TAE) institutions strategically pursue arrangements which build enduring institutional and human-resource capacity through joint and equitable engagement in their core mandates: educational instructional, research and outreach.

Lively debate has occurred among environmentalists over the past three decades about whether economic systems can be treated as independent of environmental systems. The mainstream economic view is that man-made inputs and natural resources are highly substitutable through technological innovation, and therefore economic analysis can proceed without reference to environmental stocks and flows. This assumption is increasingly untenable as climate change brings major changes in global and local economies. To meaningfully analyze the sustainability of economic systems, many analysts now use research frameworks that are conceptually rigorous with regard to both economic and natural systems. Understanding the nature and complexity of capital (assets) is an important step in analyzing economic sustainability. Emerging notions of capital toward the end of the 20th century included natural capital. A growing number of environmental analysts are attempting to incorporate these expanded notions of capital into theory and practice. Using the concept of natural capital, it is possible to analyze the sustainability of human and natural systems and to assess the impact of economic activity, including agriculture, on future generations as compared to the present generation. This chapter presents an overview of research approaches that attempt to incorporate both economic and environmental systems for the study of sustainability with a focus on relevance of these methods for the study of African agriculture. D. Kraybill (&) The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA e-mail: kraybill@iagri.org D. Kraybill Innovative Agricultural Research Initiative, Morogoro, Tanzania © Springer International Publishing AG 2016 R. Lal et al. (eds.), Climate Change and Multi-Dimensional Sustainability in African Agriculture, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41238-2_2 13

This study looks at the gender dimension of the effect of off-farm incomes on farm expenses. Previous analyses of the effect of off-farm earnings have used the unitary household approach and ignored the intra-household gender and bargaining features. Using cross-sectional data from rural Ghana, we estimate censored regression models to explain the effect of gender dis-aggregated off-farm earnings on farm expenditures. Separate models are estimated for male and female non-farm earnings using instrumental variable Tobit models and two-part models. The dependent variable in the regressions is the logarithm of chemical input expenditure. To account for the endogeneity of off-farm incomes for both spouses, the literacy level of each spouse and the average off-farm earnings of the neighbours are used as instruments. Empirical results show that while males' off-farm earnings lead to increased farm expenditures for both commercial and non-commercial households, female non-farm earnings positively affects farm input expenses for commercial households only. The results indicate that when male heads in farm households access off-farm income, higher farm input expenditures occur. Apart from confirming income non-pooling among the sampled households, the analysis also supports the rationale that the spouse that controls income dictates the patterns of spending and this is potentially detrimental for farm productivity particularly for non-commercial households. A key takeaway is that, promoting rural off-farm income projects, though they may increase overall household income, may not have the effect of increasing agricultural productivity if households are non-commercial and women dominate off-farm activities. However, if non-commercial households can be nudged toward greater production, the off-farm incomes of both spouses would contribute to greater farm input expenditure and hence greater productivity in agriculture.

The Innovative Agricultural Research Initiative (iAGRI) is a long-term investment in agricultural higher education and research capacity in Tanzania funded by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and led by The Ohio State University in conjunction with five other U.S. land grant universities and the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM). Although University contributions to sustainable agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa have been well documented, for the past several decades, donors and national governments have neglected agricultural higher education institutions. The main goal of the iAGRI project is to improve food security and agricultural productivity in Tanzania by strengthening the training and collaborative research capacities of Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (MALF) and has four major objectives:1) implementing a program of collaborative agriculture research with SUA and MALF; 2) providing advanced degree training in agriculture for Tanzanian graduate students; 3) strengthening the capacity of SUA to develop and implement instructional, research and outreach programs; and 4) promoting cooperation between SUA, U.S. universities, and global south universities. The paper summarizes outcomes of the degree training, collaborative research and institutional strengthening efforts and innovative approaches to institutional capacity development (ICD). iAGRI granted scholarships to 139 Tanzanians to pursue graduate degrees in the agricultural sciences, with half studying at U.S. universities and half studying at RUFORUM affiliated universities in Africa and India. Nearly half of the candidates were women. Although human capacity development (HCD) is important, it is not a substitute for ICD. Approaches used to promote ICD are discussed including improved planning processes, organizational experiments, and promotion of innovations and linkages to the private sector.

In the rudimentary policy analyses featured in introductory economics textbooks, problems are portrayed as arising in an isolated fashion and remediable by a single action on the government's part. Under these circumstances, policy reform is a fairly straightforward exercise. Provided that, for the most part, markets function well, there is little doubt that deregulating a price here or taxing pollution there makes good sense.

This paper examines the role of remittances in the livelihoods of households in developing countries. Previous studies have shown that remittances are mostly utilized for investment in estates, agricultural inputs or education; however, remittances may also be useful for smoothing consumption by poor rural households. Hence, we estimated the differences in consumption patterns for macronutrients and micronutrients between remittance recipients and non-recipients using data from Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. An instrumental variable strategy was adopted in econometric estimations of nutrient consumption to address issues of self-selection and endogeneity of net income and remittances. Furthermore, the instrumental variable quantile regression method was used to estimate the distributional effects of remittances. A major finding was that remittances increased investment in intake of nutrients such as proteins, vitamin A, vitamin C and calcium; these are nutrients that are vitally important for physical development of children and for improving the health of adults. Remittances did not have a significant effect on consumption of macronutrients such as carbohydrates and fats, or total calories.

This article investigates how health shocks affect farm productivity in the presence of microcredit. It is expected that microcredit increases agricultural productivity by enhancing allocative and technical efficiency and by overcoming financial constraints that reduce purchase of inputs. However, microcredit will have competing uses in the event of uninsured health shocks to the household. Using an endogenous switching regression model and after accounting for self-selection, the results reveal that microcredit has a significant mitigating effect on farm productivity losses. Thus, microcredit generates a double dividend among smallholders serving as insurance against health shocks in rural areas and improving agricultural productivity.

This paper uses the contingent valuation method (CVM) to determine farmers׳ willingness to pay (WTP) for eliminating the risks of crop loss associated with climate change through access to improved irrigation. The data for the analysis was gathered by using a double-bounded survey of 225 randomly sampled farmers in 15 villages on Mount Kilimanjaro. To minimize initial value bias, respondents were randomly assigned initial values. The policy contribution consists of the valuation of improved irrigation in the presence of climate change risks, while the applied welfare contribution comprises empirical evidence about the impact of risk belief on welfare valuation. We argue on conceptual grounds that farmers׳ belief in risk is important, as it influences their valuation of the irrigation scheme; however, risk belief׳s subjectivity makes it rather endogenous and therefore challenging to capture. Therefore, we use an Interval Regression Model with an endogenous explanatory variable to correct for the endogenous nature of the risk belief variable and account for the interval nature of the dependent variable. We found farmers׳ WTP to be between 7% and 21% of their income, and that the investment cost of improving an irrigation scheme could be paid back after a minimum of 13 years of operation.

We use a dataset of rural Indian households to investigate the effects of maternal participation in labor markets on child nutrition (the standardized height-for-age). Our study differs methodologically from previous research in this realm in that we are using an instrumental variable quantile regression framework in order to estimate the causal effects of maternal work at various locations of the height-for-age distribution in rural India. The quantile estimates provide evidence of large heterogeneity in the effect of a mother’s work on child nutrition. In particular, the results suggest that it is children in the lower tail of the distribution who experience more sizable ‘nutritional premiums’ due to maternal labor market participation; the effects are small and insignificant for children in the rest of the distribution.

Enhancing farmers' incomes through the utilisation of improved agricultural technologies is an important step towards poverty eradication among rural households in developing countries. Using empirical data from small-scale Arabica coffee farmers in Manafwa district in Uganda, this paper assesses the effect of integrated pest management (IPM) on net coffee revenue. The study also estimates the rural income multiplier of IPM adoption. After controlling for endogeneity and selection bias, we found that the multiplier effect of IPM use is positive and significant. The increase in income arising from the use of IPM leads to a more than proportional increase in demand for farm non-tradable and non-farm non-tradable commodities. Hence, coffee farming with IPM has a higher rural income multiplier than conventional coffee farming. These findings provide evidence that the incomes of smallholder coffee farmers and rural community economies can be raised through the use of production technologies that are less environmentally invasive than conventional coffee-growing technologies.

Although most countries in the world are rapidly urbanizing, the majority of the global population – particularly the poor – continue to live in rural areas. This Handbook rejects the popular notion that urbanization should be universally encouraged and presents clear evidence of the vital importance of rural people and places, particularly in terms of environmental conservation. Expert contributors from around the world explore how global trends, state policies and grassroots movements affect contemporary rural areas in both developed and developing countries.

The effect of food-for-work (FFW) programs on crop choices for farm households in rural Ethiopia is analyzed. FFW compensation reduces the household’s consumption risk in the face of adverse production shocks. I explore how this reduction in consumption risk conditions households to opt for high-yielding and high-return crops. Using panel data, we find that access to FFW two periods ago positively affects maize crop choices in the current period. This result is robust to other shocks and crops in the household’s portfolio. We conclude that access to FFW programs has long-term effects on crop choice behavior hence FFW can be designed to improve adoption of high yielding crops and varieties.

Recent trends in Ugandan agriculture indicate output is increasing for most crops but at a declining rate. The pervasive decline in output per unit of input (factor productivity) threatens the economic well-being and food security of producers and consumers of food in Uganda. Many households are both agricultural producers and consumers and have little access to other sources of livelihood (UBOS 2007). For these households, the declining productivity is particularly serious. Evidence is presented in this paper that improved agricultural inputs and extension information contribute to higher yields, but rates of adoption of improved agricultural inputs are low and many farmers have no access to extension services. Despite the low productivity, marketed surplus as a share of total agricultural output has increased for many food crops (PMA 2007). On the basis of the regression results, we address policy-related “levers of productivity” that influence agricultural output in Uganda. All agricultural inputs besides land (labor, fertilizer, chemicals, improved seeds, and agricultural assets) have a positive and statistically significant impact on output per acre on farms in at least one of the three size categories. Schooling, agricultural know-how, and credit also have positive effects on per-acre output. Land is the exception among inputs: the finding that expanding cultivated acreage is associated with a decline in output per acre is robust across a large number of model specifications with which we experimented during the analysis. Clearly, Uganda's food security problems cannot be solved at the "extensive margin," but must be addressed by greater use of modern inputs and technology. Land area cultivated in Uganda has increased more rapidly than agricultural output over the period 1999-2006, implying a decrease in land productivity. The technology employed in agriculture remains rudimentary and there is relatively little use of modern inputs. Output per acre could be increased through greater use of fertilizer, agricultural assets, agricultural chemicals, improved seeds, credit, and extension services. Each of these inputs plays an effective role in land productivity in at least one farm size category. Fertilizer stands out for its positive and statistically significant effect on productivity across all farm sizes. An important task of agricultural policy is to remove the impediments that prevent greater use of modern inputs.

U.S. states and localities often engage in economic development policies using incentives and abatements for specific firms or industries. Yet, there is very little empirical evidence suggesting that such policies are successful. Why, then, do governments engage in these policies? In order to answer this question, we employ a model that considers not only geographic and economic factors, but also, in a novel application, local political conditions. A unique survey of U.S. county governments forms the basis for our empirical assessment of both traditional economic development policies and new-wave policies. Using probit, Poisson, negative binomial, and spatial econometric models, we find evidence that the use of incentives is inversely related to local economic conditions. Furthermore, we find Republican counties are more apt to use incentives, though counties dominated by one political party are less likely to use them.

Many researchers advocate active local government responses to poverty and other economic disparities. In doing so, they raise a generally unexplored question: can local governments themselves influence poverty net of other determinants? This study extends past research in two ways by (1) analyzing the poverty-reducing role of county governments and (2) evaluating new relationships pertaining to the comparative influence of government capacity and specific policies. The authors assess the degree to which county government capacity and economic development policies relate to disparities in job growth, individual and child poverty, and household income. The empirical analysis is based on a unique set of primary and secondary data on county governments for the post-2000 period. County government capacity as measured by county centralization and autonomy from upper-level government is related to economic growth and poverty reduction. By contrast, policy variables have little consistent association with economic disparities.