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What makes a strong formative stage for SMEs? Public sector intervention, argues Hilary Nwokeabia.

The recently published F&BKP report on food wastage shows that a significant decline in food wastage will not automatically improve food security. There may be a positive impact on resource efficiency and general food availability in the...

In the opening lecture of the 14th General Conference of the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), Professor of International Development at the UK’s Open University Raphael Kaplinsky addressed the challenges...

Organizing a social enterprise is more a question of generating social impact than income, which puts it at odds with the standard idea of doing business. Therefore, social entrepreneurship needs a business strategy that goes further than making a...

Resource-rich Africa must expand its industrial sector on its way to economic inclusiveness.

African economic transformation should be inclusive, but how can this be achieved? Experts discussed this at the launch of the preview of the 2013 African Transformation Report.

How can we create a more inclusive economy and what obstacles lie in the way? This debate seeks answers.

To feed the world’s growing population in a sustainable and inclusive way with good quality food is one of the main tasks for our time. The solution lies partly at the local level: the livelihoods, and the cultural, socioeconomic, and environmenta...

Improving market access, linking farmers to markets, developing inclusive value chains; these are popular but challenging activities among development practitioners. The challenges results from the limited capabilities of (small) farmers to produc...

Mining companies can contribute to the development of rural communities by encouraging and supporting local farmers to develop more productive activities, beyond their subsistence activities.

Farmers need to organize and operate as a business unit, to receive knowledge on value chains prices more equally. 

Africa has the potential to be an agricultural power. However, the components of the value chain are delinked from one another, and there is a lack of creative investments, which could have spark-plug and catalytic effects on rural lives.

Feeding growing urban communities with healthy nutritious food may sound challenging but offers a tremendous opportunity for intra-regional trade, writes Ian Sayers.

Dutch food security policy builds on the expertise and knowledge of an active public and private agri-sector to enhance Dutch and global development through partnership.

The Broker dossier on food security is an interactive platform with the aim of publishing and debating innovative ways to secure good quality food and nutrition. It also identifies new actors in the food security debate and looks at how knowledge...

Less Pretension, More Ambition, a report written by the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), has succeeded in shaking up the aid debate. It has reiterated the urgency of thoroughly rethinking development policies.

The retail revolution is threatening the livelihoods of millions of farmers in many developing countries. But recent research in India demonstrates that it is possible for small farmers and artisans to be included in modern, integrated value chains.

Gender inequalities affect the ways in which value chains operate at all levels. Promoting gender justice can result in a ‘quadruple win–win’, benefiting women, men and enterprises throughout the chain, as well as national economies.

Global value chains offer many opportunities for rural entrepreneurs in developing countries to become competitive actors in world markets. But unless local power relations are taken into account, value chain development is unlikely to reduce pove...

Although trade has evolved in the last two decades, shifting from complete goods to intermediary inputs, our understanding of its dynamics has failed to keep pace. As a result, the policy options conferred to developing countries to industrialize...

Value chain development is a key concept in strategies to reduce rural poverty in developing countries. For entrepreneurs, such chains promise a way to access new markets as well as to add value to their products. But value chains often exclude th...

Jim Woodhill blogged for The Broker from the Convergence of Science conference in Ghana which focused on strengthening innovation systems for agriculture and rural poverty reduction.

According to a recent International Labour Organization (ILO) report, some 74 million children below the age of 14 are engaged in the so-called ‘worst forms’ of child labour. Although this number has been declining over time, it is still too high...