Agriculture in the 21st century faces the challenge of finding the balance needed to mitigate the evolving constraints of climate change while continuing to perform its functions. In Senegal, agricultural sector policy has been adjusted to reduce the use of chemical fertilizers by 30%. This policy is in line with the path of agricultural intensification, through microdosing technology, recommended for farms with low financial capacity. However, beyond the control of fertilizing resources, microdosing technology incorporates costs such as extra workload, drudgery and know-how, which have a strong influence on the choice of adoption. Indeed, the acceptability of an innovation depends on two factors, namely perceived usefulness and ease of use. Before introducing a new technology, it is therefore necessary to study its suitability for users’ adoption or rejection criteria.
Goats are an important source of income, nutrition and resilience in Senegal. This study assesses opportunities to strengthen women’s agency, increase resilience to climate change, and improve nutrition along the various stages of goat value chains from the acquisition of feed resources and other inputs to processing, marketing and consumption of various goat products. The qualitative study finds that even though goats are more climate resilient than other livestock, climate change impacts on goat production and productivity are increasingly felt, particularly through impacts on feed resources.
Performant agricultural advisory services (AAS) in Africa are crucial for improving the agricultural productivity and food security of the farm households. Yet, evidence‐based study on the impacts of AAS on farm performance are scarce, especially in West African countries. This study evaluates the impact of access to AAS on input use and farm performance in Senegal, employing the instrumental variable and control function approaches accounting for selection bias. The approaches are also employed to several sub‐samples to see if the impacts are heterogeneous across crop types and fertilizer use, and matching techniques are applied to test the robustness of the results.
Le BAME est une unité de recherche en sciences économiques et sociales pour la compréhension des transformations du monde rural sénégalais.
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