Building Innovation Systems for Small-Scale Agricultural Activities in Sub-Saharan Africa: Key Success Factors

Introduction

There has been increasing global demand for agricultural produce, not only for food security, but also by pressures for new sources of feed-stock for renewable energy. Compared with most regions in the world, sub-Saharan Africa shows a lot of promise to be the global basket for agricultural produce. Not only is there an abundance of land in most countries of the region, a majority of the population in the area are engaged in small-scale agricultural activities. Furthermore, there is a ready regional market due to a considerable and growing population in the region. In addition, and barring grave climatic conditions, a greater part of the region, especially the Guinea Savannah is most suitable for rain-fed agricultural production. It has been reported in several studies that smallholders have an important role to play in the development of African agriculture, not only because they produce about 75% of agricultural products in the area but also because such activities may have a positive impact on the socio-economic indices of practitioners (World Bank, 2009). In spite of the natural resources endowed on the region, agricultural productivity when compared with other regions remains low. For example, cereal yield per hectare in kilograms of harvested land (including wheat, rice, maize, barley, oats, rye, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, and mixed grains) for Nigeria, Kenya, Gabon, Zimbabwe (countries in the west, east, central and south sub-Saharan Africa respectively), Brazil, Thailand and Belgium for the 2010 to 2014 period was 1,537, 1,727, 1691, 724, 4826, 3022 and 9213 respectively. (World Bank, 2015). In comparison with smallholder productivity, the World Bank (2009) competitiveness indicators showed that the average domestic yield for smallholder cotton production in Mozambique, Nigeria and Zambia for 2007 was 0.6, 0.9 and 0.8 Metric tons per hectare (mt/ha) respectively while that of Brazil was 3.8 mt/ha for large-scale production. The World Bank (2009) report also shows that the domestic yield of Thailand for rice more than doubles the average yield of the 3 aforementioned African countries. Carr (2013) however argues that with adequate inputs such as in fertiliser and seeds, smallholders can be as productive as large farms. The author reports that small-scale farmers in Japan and China have achieved levels of productivity per unit area of land equal to and even higher than large-scale farmers anywhere in the world.