Discovering and maintaining agricultural commodities markets is not enough for developing countries. They have to build a culture of synthesizing and sharing evidence in real-time. Absence of a culture of synthesizing information and knowledge from diverse sources remains a big challenge among farmers, economic actors, consumers and policy makers in the majority of developing countries. Read more about The merits of an effective marketplace for agricultural evidence[…]

Informal markets have existed for centuries, as contexts where communities make sense of their resources and exchange value. However, urbanization has given these markets a more pronounced role particularly in meeting the needs of different classes of consumers and farmers. In many African countries, informal markets are the fastest ways for transferring income from buyers Read more about Revisiting the role of informal markets in distributing income[…]

Although digital technology is beginning to show potential for increasing the impact of individual knowledge, in most African marginalized communities, community knowledge will remain important for a long time. Unfortunately, many development interventions are meddling with African communities’ capacity to make sense of knowledge. Development actors sincerely want to help marginalized communities but their strategies Read more about Making marginalized farmers ready for the impact of globalization[…]

While African countries neglect their informal economies in planning and policy development, the informal sector provides several avenues of looking at knowledge. One of these avenues is the relationship between slow and fast knowledge. Commodities flowing into informal markets from farming areas reveal the extent to which slow and fast knowledge have distinct characteristics. Slow Read more about Slow knowledge and fast knowledge in African Agriculture[…]

While billions of dollars have gone into African agriculture, smallholder farmers and other food producers are yet to be characterized and structured in ways that give them a recognizable economic identity. Unless value chain actors have a clear economic identity, it will remain difficult for them to participate in a fast-moving global agricultural market where Read more about Carving and sustaining economic identities in evolving agricultural ecosystems[…]

One of the most seductive assumptions in African agriculture is that farmers and aspiring agricultural entrepreneurs can succeed through following a specific set of steps. However, as markets become highly networked and competitive, success no longer just depends on what a farmer or an entrepreneur does but on the actions of rivals or competitors. Unless Read more about Using the market to cultivate a global mindset among farmers and entrepreneurs[…]