Linking African smallholders to high value markets

Medium-term indicators, in terms of outcomes (for example improvements in income, enhancement of productivity and value of exports) and long-term indicators in terms of impacts (for example reductions in the incidence of poverty, environmental sustainability and gender equality) are more difficult to define. [...] Putting aside the lack of a common metric of ‘success’, it is important to recognise the range of factors influencing the efficacy of a particular intervention. [...] Although, none of the presented impacts were rated on the negative side of the scaling (that is with a mean score above 3), the items with the highest mean scores were ‘level of financial risk’, ‘health risks to farm workers’, ‘environmental sustainability of the wider community’ and ‘environmental sustainability of the farm enterprise’, suggesting an ambiguity (‘neither positive nor negative’) in [...] Looking across these three principle components, it would appear that respondents judged the impact of participation in terms of the alleviation of constraints (PC1), on the one hand, and the direct (PC2) and indirect (PC3) impacts of participation on the other. [...] Pertinent constraints included ‘fragmentation of household land holding’, ‘lack of scale’ and ‘insecure land tenure’ The third principle component (PC3) can be called access to finance and risk management and included the constraints of ‘lack of access to competitive priced finance’ and ‘risk management concerns’.