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Oost-Afrika���s waterbalans is onderhevig aan natuurlijke schommelingen die zich afspelen op verschillende tijdsschalen. Deze variatie heeft een grote impact op zowel natuurlijke ecosystemen als op de draagkracht voor duurzame landbouw, en vormt tevens de achtergrond op dewelke antropogene klimaatverandering zich afspeelt. De alkaliene zoutmeren (���sodameren���) van de Keniaanse Riftvallei zijn niet alleen unieke ecosystemen vanuit huidig biologisch en geochemisch standpunt, ze vormen ook natuurlijke archieven om klimaat- en ecosysteemdynamiek te bestuderen over grote delen van het verleden waarvoor er geen rechtstreekse observaties beschikbaar zijn. Dit wordt ge��llustreerd voor de meren van het Magadi-Natron bekken en het Bogoriameer, waarvan de sedimenten de complexe interactie tussen klimaat, omgeving en menselijke activiteiten tijdens de voorbije decennia, eeuwen en millennia blootleggen. Salt Lakes as Archives of the History of Climate and Environment: Case Studies from the Kenyan Rift Valley. ��� The water balance of East Africa displays marked natural variability on a plethora of timescales. This variability has a significant impact on natural ecosystems and their capability to support sustainable agriculture, while being the background on which anthropogenic climate change occurs. The saline alkaline (���soda���) lakes of the Kenyan Rift Valley not only are unique ecosystems from a current biological and geochemical point of view, they also provide natural archives allowing to study the dynamics of climate and environment over long periods for which no direct human observations are available. This is illustrated for the Magadi-Natron basin and for lake Bogoria, whose sediments reveal the complex interaction between climate, environment and human activity over the past decades, centuries and millennia., Mededeling voorgesteld tijdens de zitting van de Klasse voor Natuur- en Geneeskundige Wetenschappen van 26 maart 2019. Tekst ontvangen op 31 mei 2019 en aan peer review voorgelegd. Definitieve versie, goedgekeurd door de reviewers, ontvangen op 19 november 2019.

The economic history of Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by geographically and temporally dispersed booms and busts. The export-led ‘cash-crop revolution’ in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial era is a key example of an economic boom. This thesis examines how external influences and local realities shaped the nature, extent and impact of the ‘cash-crop revolution’ in colonial Uganda, a landlocked country in central east Africa, where cotton and coffee production for global markets took off following completion of a railway to the coast. The thesis consists of five targeted ‘interventions’ into contemporary debates of comparative African development. Each of these five interventions is grounded in the understanding that the ability of rural Africans to respond to and benefit from trade integration during the colonial era was mediated by colonial policies, resource endowments and local institutions. The first chapter reconstructs welfare development of Ugandan cash-crop farmers. Recent scholarship on historical welfare development in Sub-Saharan Africa has uncovered long-term trends in standards of living. How the majority of rural dwellers fared, however, remains largely elusive. This chapter presents a new approach to reconstructing rural living standards in a historical context, building upon the well-established real wage literature, but moving beyond it to capture rural realities, employing sub-national rural survey, census, and price data. The approach is applied to colonial and early post-colonial Uganda (1915–70), and yields a number of findings. While an expanding smallholder-based cash-crop sector established itself as the backbone of Uganda’s colonial economy, farm characteristics remained largely stagnant after the initial adoption of cash crops. Smallholders maintained living standards well above subsistence level, and while the profitability of cash crops was low, their cultivation provided a reliable source of cash income. At the same time, there were pronounced limits to rural welfare expansion. Around the time of decolonization, unskilled wages rose rapidly while farm incomes lagged behind. As a result, an urban–rural income reversal took place. The study also reveals considerable differences within Uganda, which were mediated to an important extent by differential resource endowments. Smallholders in Uganda’s banana regions required fewer labour inputs to maintain a farm income than their grain-farming counterparts, creating opportunities for additional income generation and livelihood diversification. The second chapter zooms in on labour migration which connected Belgian-controlled Ruanda-Urundi to British-controlled Buganda, the central province of Uganda on the shores of Lake Victoria. The emergence of new labour mobility patterns was a key aspect of economic change in colonial Africa. Under conditions of land abundance and labour scarcity, the supply of wage labour required either the ‘pull’ forces of attractive working conditions and high wages, or the ‘push’ forces of taxation and other deliberate colonial interventions. Building upon primary sources, I show that this case diverges from the ‘conventional’ narrative of labour scarcity in colonial Africa. I argue that Ruanda-Urundi should be regarded as labour abundant and that migrants were not primarily ‘pushed’ by colonial labour policies, but rather by poverty and limited access to agricultural resources. This explains why they were willing to work for low wages in Buganda. I show that African rural employers were the primary beneficiaries of migrant labour, while colonial governments on both sides of the border were unable to control the course of the flow. As in the first chapter, this chapter highlights that the effects of trade integration on African rural development were uneven, and mediated by differences in resource endowments, local institutions and colonial policies. The third chapter zooms out of the rural economy, evaluating the broader opportunity structures faced by African men and women in Uganda, and discussing the interaction of local institutions and colonial policies as drivers of uneven educational and occupational opportunities. The chapter engages with a recent article by Meier zu Selhausen and Weisdorf (2016) to show how selection biases in, and Eurocentric interpretations of, parish registers have provoked an overly optimistic account of European influences on the educational and occupational opportunities of African men and women. We confront their dataset, drawn from the marriage registers of the Anglican Cathedral in Kampala, with Uganda’s 1991 census, and show that trends in literacy and numeracy of men and women born in Kampala lagged half a century behind those who wedded in Namirembe Cathedral. We run a regression analysis showing that access to schooling during the colonial era was unequal along lines of gender and ethnicity. We foreground the role of Africans in the spread of education, argue that European influences were not just diffusive but also divisive, and that gender inequality was reconfigured rather than eliminated under colonial rule. This chapter also makes a methodological contribution. The renaissance of African economic history in the past decade has opened up new research avenues to study the long-term social and economic development of Africa. We show that a sensitive treatment of African realities in the evaluation of European colonial legacies, and a critical stance towards the use of new sources and approaches, is crucial. The fourth chapter singles out the role of resource endowments in explaining Uganda’s ‘cotton revolution’ in a comparative African perspective. Why did some African smallholders adopt cash crops on a considerable scale, while most others were hesitant to do so? The chapter sets out to explore the importance of factor endowments in shaping the degrees to which cash crops were adopted in colonial tropical Africa. We conduct an in-depth case study of the ‘cotton revolution’ in colonial Uganda to put the factor endowments perspective to the test. Our empirical findings, based on an annual panel data analysis at the district-level from 1925 until 1960, underscore the importance of Uganda’s equatorial bimodal rainfall distribution as an enabling factor for its ‘cotton revolution’. Evidence is provided at a unique spatial micro-level, capitalizing on detailed household surveys from the same period. We demonstrate that previous explanations associating the variegated responses of African farmers to cash crops with, either the role of colonial coercion, or the distinction between ‘forest/banana’ and ‘savannah/grain’ zones, cannot explain the widespread adoption of cotton in Uganda. We argue, instead, that the key to the cotton revolution were Uganda’s two rainy seasons, which enabled farmers to grow cotton while simultaneously pursuing food security. Our study highlights the importance of food security and labour seasonality as important determinants of uneven agricultural commercialization in colonial tropical Africa. The fifth and final chapter further investigates the experience of African smallholders with cotton cultivation, providing a comparative explanatory analysis of variegated cotton outcomes, focusing in particular on the role of colonial and post-colonial policies. The chapter challenges the widely accepted view that (i) African colonial cotton projects consistently failed, that (ii) this failure should be attributed to conditions particular to Africa, which made export cotton inherently unviable and unprofitable to farmers, and that (iii) the repression and resistance often associated with cotton, all resulted from the stubborn and overbearing insistence of colonial governments on the crop per se. I argue along three lines. Firstly, to show that cotton outcomes were diverse, I compare cases of cotton production in Sub-Saharan Africa across time and space. Secondly, to refute the idea that cotton was a priori unattractive, I argue that the crop had substantial potential to connect farmers to markets and contribute to poverty alleviation, particularly in vulnerable, marginal and landlocked areas. Thirdly, to illustrate how an interaction between local conditions and government policies created conducive conditions for cotton adoption, I zoom in on the few yet significant ‘cotton success stories’ in twentieth century Africa. Smallholders in colonial Uganda adopted cotton because of favourable ecological and marketing conditions, and policies had an auxiliary positive effect. Smallholders in post-colonial Francophone West Africa faced much more challenging local conditions, but benefitted from effective external intervention and coordinated policy. On a more general level, this chapter demonstrates that, from a perspective of rural development, colonial policies should not only be seen as overbearing and interventionist, but also as inadequate, failing to aid rural Africans to benefit from new opportunities created by trade integration.

Ethiopia is an agrarian country where agriculture dominates the economy, and thus agriculture is considered as an engine of growth by the government. Seed as one of the agricultural technologies, in fact, a carrier of many technologies, is critical to increasing production, but the use of quality seed from formal sources in Ethiopia is very limited. The current Ethiopian government has focused on agricultural development and has developed different policies both for agriculture in general and for the seed sector in particular. Following the developmental state approach, the government intensified its involvement in the seed sector to enhance agricultural development. Despite the policies and efforts of the government, a shortage of seed, a mismatch between demand and supply, the carryover of seed despite not satisfying the demand of farmers, and poor seed quality have been persistent challenges to the Ethiopian seed sector. Many studies have identified technical gaps that limit the development of the seed sector, and some of the studies have also discussed the extent to which policy responds to existing problems, and the extent to which what is in the policy documents is implemented. However, the causes of these ‘gaps’ are seldom discussed. The lack of such knowledge limits the understanding of the challenges, making it difficult to properly support the seed sector. For these reasons, this research has gone beyond the mere identification of ‘gaps’, aiming to analyse how actors and institutions influence seed policy making and implementation in Ethiopia. The goal of this research is twofold: to narrow the knowledge gap about policy making and implementation in the Ethiopian seed sector, and to contribute to the debate concerning how to make the seed sector function better. The central research question is: how did actors and institutions influence the formulation and implementation of seed policies in Ethiopia from 2008 to 2016? The empirical research to answer this overall research question addresses two processes: policy making and policy implementation. These include the process of revising the 2000 Ethiopian seed law and the process of implementing direct seed marketing. By analysing these two processes, the thesis unravels how actors and associated institutions have influenced seed policy making and implementation in Ethiopia. The major sources of data were interviews of actors in the seed sector, and desk research of different reports. Guided by theoretical concepts, the research used qualitative methods to generate and analyse data. Given the complexity of societal phenomenon, several analytical lenses have been used to examine the data in this research. In order to explain how actors negotiate the content of a policy document, including defining the problem and solution, the concept of discourse analysis is used, focusing on frame, the rounds model, and the policy arena. Similarly, to explain the process of implementing the existing policy and the outcome, the concepts of multi-level perspective on transition, transition management, non-decision making, and institutional lock-in are used. While using these analytical lenses to explain seed policy making and implementation, the concept of institutions has remained a central concept. Chapter 2 analyses the negotiation process, looking into the topics of seed sector governance and variety registration. The analysis reveals that different policy arenas provide opportunities for different actors to place their preferred policy options on the table, and to get them incorporated into the draft working document. While this is a positive step towards a deliberative policy making, the final decision is made by the executive branch of the government. Such a process can be explained by two informal institutions. These are the loose connection between the drafting arenas and the decision-making arenas, and the blurred separation of power between the executive and the legislature. At the Council of Ministers (CoM), where the critical decisions are made, the ministry presents its perspective, particularly on issues where disagreement exists between the ministry and other actors. The council uses the content of the draft and the justification of the ministry for endorsing the draft policy document. Moreover, the parliament can change the content of the draft policy document only if the ministry agrees with the change, regardless of the arguments and justifications provided by other stakeholders. Thus, the inputs of stakeholders are considered as long as the ministry agrees with the suggestions, and the policy decision remains in the hands of the ministry. Chapter 3 presents the different frames used by different actors to describe the problem of seed quality. While government officials attribute the problem of seed quality to the lack of alignment between the seed sector governance and the regional government structure, experts and bureaucrats attribute the problem to the lack of coordination at national level. As a result, they respectively suggest the decentralization and centralization of seed sector governance. These frames are embedded in the overall interest and strategy of the actors promoting the frames. The centralization frame reflects the interest of experts and bureaucrats to have a say with regards to the seed sector. They have lost this power because of the federal structure that was established formally in 1995. On the contrary, the decentralization frame is embedded in the government’s aim to implement the constitution that established the federal structure in 1995. Despite the fact that the process of revising the seed law took about four years, these actors could not agree on either of the options or find an alternative. This shows a lack of deliberation and reflexivity during the process of revising the seed law, reflecting the fact that seed policy discussion has been part of a larger debate about (de)centralization in Ethiopia since 1991. Thus, in addition to the issue of seed quality, the frames of centralization and decentralization are shaped by the old (unitary) and the new (federal) institutions of the Ethiopian government system. Chapter 4 focuses on the process of introducing and expanding direct seed marketing (DSM) in Ethiopia. Despite the fact that seed marketing is included in the policies on paper, the seed of major food crops is distributed through government channels resulting in inefficiency of seed distribution. The regional seed core groups introduced DSM in 2011, and by 2016 about one-third of the hybrid maize seed, the main seed marketed in Ethiopia, in Amhara, Oromia and the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ region (SNNPR), was sold through DSM. The presence of actors outside the seed distribution system was instrumental for introducing the concept of DSM. To start the piloting of this existing policy, the core group needed to get approval from the heads of the bureaus of agriculture (BoAs). However, such approval was not required for other new ideas, like establishing an independent regulatory body, showing how the informal institutions guide what has to be approved by bureau heads, regardless of the formal policy. In addition to the demonstrated potential of DSM to overcome the problem of seed distribution inefficiency, strategic management of the stakeholders' process was critical in expanding the area under the pilot. Many actors, including the executives, supported the expansion of DSM to many areas. Despite the expansion of DSM, its demonstrated potential to overcome the problem of seed supply inefficiency, the support it received from the government officials, and the general policy of market-based approach, the government has not endorsed the use of DSM beyond the pilot. Chapter 5 points out that the government excluded the issue of seed marketing from the seed regulation enacted in 2016, showing that the government has no intention to make seed marketing one of the seed delivery channels in the near future. The major reasons for this are: bureaucrats do not want to contribute to the decision making of DSM because they assume that the government has a strong political interest to remain in seed distribution; bureaucrats need the seed distribution system to achieve the targets set by the government; there is a symbiotic relationship between actors, the extension service as well as seed producers, and the seed distribution system, and so actors want to maintain the distribution system Such institutionalized thinking and practices have created an institutional lock-in that prevents bureaucrats from presenting the recommendation to government officials, thereby leading to non-decision about the future of DSM. Chapter 6 summarizes the action of actors in affecting policy making and implementation as influenced by two conflicting sets of institutions. The first set relates to market-based thinking versus centralized planning as leading principles for economic development. Both are used as a discourse for promoting economic development and its operationalization, which are shaping how actors view and overcome the problems of the seed sector. This also explains why policies on paper are not implemented and why new initiatives are not formally endorsed. The tension between these divergent institutions has increased because of the dual use of seed by the government: the government has used the seed to both promote economic development and maintain strong political ties with farmers. The second set of conflicting institutions relates to authoritarian versus participatory decision making. On the one hand, is the government practice of authoritative decision-making, where only the input of stakeholders is considered when it fits in with the existing policy direction of the executives. On the other hand, it is common practice to organize stakeholders to contribute to policy making and implementation. The practice of considering the policy input of others only when it fits in with the policy direction of the decision-makers, creates a sense of being forced to accept, increasing the tension between how the government decides and the role of stakeholders. Given the tension between the conflicting institutions, and circumstances in Ethiopia, this research suggested that choosing one approach over the other will not guarantee the development of the seed sector. There is no guarantee that the outcome of a deliberative policy making process will be a different policy option than the one opted for by one of the actors. However, the co-development of a solution for the shared seed sector problem will guarantee better ownership and thus better implementation than an imposed policy. It is also important to note that deliberative policy making and implementation is not an easy task given the current stakeholders’ landscape and the culture of authoritative decision making. Thus, the change towards deliberative policy making and implementation is not something that emerges overnight: it is a process that matures over time. This calls for the strategic management of a process of change that leads to the transformation of the seed sector into a self-reliant and resilient sector. By identifying the underlying institutions behind the challenges of the seed sector and suggesting options for improvement, this thesis contributes to the debate on how to make the seed sector function better. At a higher level, it also contributes to the debate on policy making and implementation processes in Ethiopia.

Rabies claims the lives of more than 24,000 people in Africa annually, but efforts to control the disease are still lacking, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa such as Ethiopia. The overall objective of this study was to support the design of an appropriate cost-effective rabies control policy in Ethiopia by providing insights in the health burden of the disease and its economic impacts, as well as an understanding of the relationship between intervention levels, implementation costs and potential returns. As most human rabies cases result from the bite of domestic dogs, the disease can be eliminated by mass canine rabies vaccination. An extensive literature review on mass canine vaccination programs in Africa indicated that most dogs in Africa are owned and therefore accessible for vaccination, but vaccination coverages strongly depend on the implemented cost schemes. Canine vaccination in Ethiopia is voluntarily based, i.e. “owner-charged”, resulting in one of the lowest coverages in the world. To assess the current burden of rabies in Ethiopia a retrospective study was conducted by collecting data on human rabies exposure over the period of one year through extensive bite case searching in three representative districts of Ethiopia. Extrapolation of the results to national level indicated an annual average of 3,000 human deaths and 97,000 rabies-exposed persons treated at an average costs of 21 USD per case, causing 2 million USD on treatment costs per year and a health loss of about 93,000 DALYs. About 77% of the exposure cases visited a health centre, while only 57% received sufficient doses of post exposure treatment. Important factors that influenced victim’s medical treatment seeking behaviour were ownership status of the biting dog, severity of the bite, body part bitten, monthly spending and distance to the nearest health centre whereas the likelihood of receiving sufficient doses of treatment were determined by monthly spending and distance to health centre. The district in which victims lived appeared to have a relevant influence on the likelihood of seeking medical treatment but not on the likelihood of treatment compliance. By means of a structured questionnaire administered to cattle-owning households the economic impact of rabies in livestock was assessed. Herd-level incidence rates appeared higher in the mixed crop-livestock system (21%) than in the pastoral system (11%). Average economic losses per herd due to rabies were estimated at 49 USD per year for the mixed-crop livestock system, and at 52 USD per year for the pastoral system. In light of policy support for rabies control, an evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of control strategies was performed by the use of a dynamic epidemiological model coupled with an economic analysis to predict the human health impact and economic benefit (reducing human treatment costs and livestock rabies-related losses) across a range of vaccination scenarios. Human exposures, human deaths, and rabies-related livestock losses decreased monotonically with increasing vaccination coverage. In the evaluated urban and rural districts, 50% coverage was identified as most likely scenario to provide the greatest net health benefits at the WHO-recommended willingness-to-pay threshold over a time frame of 10 years. The additional economic benefit from rabies control in livestock justified the additional costs of vaccination campaigns with higher coverages than would have been efficient from a strict human health perspective, highlighting the importance of applying a broad perspective with regard to the evaluation of vaccination benefits.

Driven by rapid urbanization, economic growth, and changes in consumption patterns, food chains in emerging and developing economies are experiencing a fundamental transformation process. This transformation is usually characterized by increased vertical coordination, growth of modern distribution channels (e.g. supermarkets), consolidation of retail markets, and an increase in export orientation. The rapid growth in demand of modern food with higher quality and safety attracts multinational enterprises to invest in agriculture and food processing in emerging economies. The appearance of multinationals in the food systems of developing countries has been claimed to have a positive impact on economic development and reduction of poverty. The multinationals have adopted modern supply chain management practices for securing a large volume and consistent supply of high quality products. They introduce new technologies that boost productivity and post-harvest management for product upgrading. While so far most research on the modernization of food systems has focused on export chains, there is growing interest in the transformation of domestic and staple food chains. Upgrading domestic food chains is needed for a more efficient supply to fast growing urban markets and to sustain access to affordable food for the rapidly growing urban consumers in sub-Saharan Africa. As domestic food value chains are more inclusive than high-value export chains, upgrading these food chains can contribute more to poverty reduction and food security. However, much remains to be understood about the process of modernization in domestic food chains and its implications for rural development. The overarching aim of this dissertation was to deepen our understanding on how organizational innovations facilitate modernization of domestic food chains using case studies from the Ethiopian barley sector. In particular, the thesis examines the effectiveness and impacts of foreign direct investments (FDI), contract farming arrangements (CFAs), producer organizations (POs), and partnerships on the upgrading of malt barley value chains and welfare of local suppliers. To address this objective, we use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches. Data were analyzed using parametric and non-parametric econometric models. The findings from the empirical chapters show that: First, our analysis reveals that the appearance of foreign companies in the malt barley chain has brought important changes in the structure and economics of the barley value chain, resulting in the development of a modern chain next to the conventional chain. It is also shown that participation in modern supply chains is determined by a range of factors that include farmer and farm characteristics. Second, the results show that participation in modern supply chains has a positive and significant impact on commercialization, intensification, quality improvement and farm gate prices, ultimately resulting in increased farmer income and spillovers towards productivity of other food crops. Third, we found that POs perform diverse economic functions to enhance rural development , but tighter coordination in food value chains demands alignment of chain activities among actors which leads to changes in the strategies and functions of POs. Fourth, we showed that POs have a positive impact on farm productivity and smallholder income. However, this positive impact of POs come at the expense of inclusiveness, i.e. POs are less inclusive. Thus, there is a tension between business performance and inclusiveness of POs. Moreover, the results show that the motivation to participate in a PO is determined by demographic and economic factors. Lastly, we found that the determinants of quality improvement at farm level are socioeconomic, technological and institutional factors. Specifically, the identified factors are farmers’ level of education, age (as a proxy for farming experience), entrepreneurial attitude, PO membership, CFA participation, and type of improved seed varieties. The thesis concludes that enhancing the modernization of food value chains involving smallholders requires organizational innovation that facilitate coordination and collaborative activities among chain actors.

Poor adoption of modern technologies in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the major factors that limit food production and thereby threaten food security of smallholder farmers. This is despite the potential and emerging success stories of new technologies in increasing productivity of smallholder agriculture. Explanations for low uptake of technologies are diverse. Some studies associated it with characteristics of the farmers and their farm; others attributed it to poor access to information about a particular technology, while some others recognize the importance of technology attributes. Farmers’ adoption decision is shaped socially and the farming practices are changing, not only because of the technical changes introduced, but also because of changes in social circumstances among smallholders. All these possible reasons did, however, miss largely important insights on how local complexities influence adoption. The research presented in this thesis analyses the social dynamics of technology-oriented interventions. More specifically, the study assessed the influence of technology introduction strategies, social networks and social differentiation on the adoption, dissemination and effects of potato technologies. As a case, it used interventions introducing improved potato technologies in Chencha, Southern Ethiopia. The field work combined individual and group in-depth interviews, household surveys and field observation for data collection. Results show that the efforts to introduce technologies for improved potato production to progressive farmers with the assumption that farmers will eventually adopt, once they become familiar with the technology is a distant prospect. Some of the production practices - agronomic field and storage practices - failed to spread to poor farmers as expected, while the majority of agronomic practices fitted well with wealthy farmers. This resulted in diverse outcomes and strategies for livelihood improvement at household level. Access to the technologies and the necessary resources and diverse needs for technology were important factors in explaining variation in adoption and effects of technology across wealth categories. Tracing the seed diffusion through farmers’ networks showed that not all households had equal access to improved seed potatoes, mainly because of social barriers formed by differences in wealth, gender and religion, and because the type of personal relationship (relatives, neighbours, friends and acquaintance) between seed providers and seed recipients affected farmer to farmer seed sharing. In addition, the set-up of farmer-group based seed production demands resources and faces contextual challenges, which could be addressed through a long-term approach that engages continually in diagnosis and responding to the emerging social as well as material challenges. Development practitioners, however, took organizing group initiatives as a one-time process of design and start-up activity. Thus, clean seed potato production and dissemination through farmers’ organizations could not be sustainable. In conclusion, the present study has indicated that through providing special attention to the social dynamics researchers can arrive at better understanding of constraints affecting technology adoption. This implies effective interventions for a range of farm contexts involve not only finding technical solutions but also integrated understanding of farmers’ production conditions and existing social dynamics.

This thesis is a sociological analysis of the agri-food system that feeds most of the over four and a half million residents of the fast-growing city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It is based on qualitative research that has generated a picture of the food system that supplies the important foods for the majority of residents of the city. The research took an actor orientated approach and started from urban eaters and then followed the food back through retailers, processors and transporters to the primary producers. Methodological lessons are derived from this process in particular the elaboration of the ‘ride-along’ as a research method. Foods followed include maize, rice, potatoes, green vegetables, eggs and milk. Other foods such as beef and chicken have also been touched on especially in relation to marketing and slaughtering operations. Instead of dismissing what has been found as ‘informal’ or trying to fit it into structuralist paradigms, from orthodox economic or political economy perspectives, I have applied a grounded theory approach in seeking to understand the core ordering principles and rationality of this system that has shown a remarkable resilience over many years. Of particular interest, especially when looking at the functioning of market places and how new actors enter into the food system, is that more important to the food system than competition are various forms of collaboration. This study comes at a time when global food production and distribution is dominated by powerful transnational corporations through an agro-industrial food system that is widely critiqued for its negative environmental and social impacts. Many argue that this industrial food system is unsustainable, yet its expansion can seem inevitable and alternatives are seen by many as incapable of feeding the world’s growing and increasingly urban population. ‘Value chain’ interventions have become popular among ‘development’ practitioners and policy makers seeking to integrate more producers into the global industrial food system rather than challenging that food system. What I have found, and present in this thesis, is a ‘symbiotic food system’ made up of multitudes of small-scale and interdependent actors that produce the food and get it to urban eaters at a city feeding scale. They do this without any vertically - or horizontally -integrated corporate structures nor with government planning and organization of the food system. This food system responds well to the needs of urban eaters, especially those in poverty, and to the interests and circumstances of small scale food producers. It is a food system that outperforms value chain interventions in returns to producers and value to eaters and has social, economic and environmental advantages when compared to the agro-industrial and corporate dominated system. This challenges assumptions that corporate food chains are necessary, or desirable, to feed cities sustainably. The symbiotic food system that feeds Dar es Salaam is not perfect, but it is working and I believe worthy of further research and interventions to create a more enabling environment for such foods systems to flourish in Tanzania and elsewhere.

As the world population is expected to expand beyond 9 billion by 2050, food production will need to increase by approximately 70% to feed the population. Furthermore, a growing part of that expanding population pertains to an upcoming middle class, leading to an increasing demand for high-value products, animal protein and safer food. To respond to this growing demand in terms of quantity and quality, supply chains are pushing market-frontiers deeper into the rural areas in developing and emerging markets to secure their supplies. As a consequence, rural smallholders including pastoralists, who have been functioning at local markets, are increasingly integrating with international markets. While such integration opens opportunities for the smallholders to access higher purchasing power, it is difficult for remote and isolated pastoralists with limited productive resources and limited institutional support to recognize and seize the opportunities. Because pastoralists are mostly isolated from the other value chain members, they have not developed the knowledge regarding how the market functions and what the value chain members want. By conducting a field experiment among a group of Ethiopian pastoralists, this thesis shows that marketing training is an important approach in enhancing the market knowledge of pastoralists that enable them to understand the market environment, to reproduce their animals as per market requirements and to generate returns. The thesis also has implications for other rural smallholders that share similar characteristics with the pastoralists.

In the human development effort, different countries are underscoring the role of technical-vocational education and training (TVET) in providing relevant knowledge and skills to improve productivity, increase access to employment opportunities and raise the standard of living. It is in recognition of this that, in all Ethiopian educational development endeavors, TVET has been considered to play a key role to tackle the country’s socio-economic underdevelopment through knowledgeable and skillful manpower. Since its introduction in 1941, TVET has been guided by different policies and strategies adopted by successive governments who came to power at different times. This thesis investigates how TVET has reached the current stage of its development in Ethiopia and the challenges encountered in implementing a competence-based system aimed at improving present and future TVET practices. Within this broad aim, the thesis looks into the historical pathways TVET in Ethiopia has passed through time, teachers’ involvement in policy and curriculum development and implementation, the extent to which TVET programs are competence-based (‘competentiveness’) and TVET teachers’ training and professional development. A mix of methods (quantitative and qualitative) was employed and data were collected through questionnaires, interview and documents.Four Polytechnic TVET colleges in Addis Ababa, TVET teachers, students and employed TVET graduates, teacher training teachers and students were involved. The research findings showed that TVET development lacked consistent and stable policy direction, greatly influenced by government ideology. Competence-based TVET was implemented under severe challenges which include lack of adequately prepared teachers and resources, frequent curricula changes, lack of employers cooperation, discontent of teachers and administrators, etc. The competence-based approach was implemented without extensive deliberations and understanding by TVET teachers in which teachers participation was minimal. Positive correlation between TVET teachers’ participation in educational reform and perception towards TVET system was observed. Thought teachers, students and graduates observed competence-based education and training (CBET) principles in the Ethiopian TVET system, competence-based TVET is not performing well with regard to the practical dimensions of CBET (mainly the “how” aspect) in accordance with the principles of competence-based education. In a positively perceived work environment, ‘competentiveness’ of a TVET programs and employed TVET graduates’ workplace performance was observed. The TVET teacher training programs lack alignment (coherence) with competence-based TVET curriculum in terms of curriculum design and practices. The delivery is predominantly teacher-centered: more lecture oriented with less opportunity for students self and group reflection; student assessment was norm-referenced, not individual competence assessment. Though teachers believe that teacher professional development (TPD) enhances their professional growth, the practices were not in line with their belief; the personal initiative of TVET teachers to undertake TPD activities was minimal; no systematic professional development plan exists in TVET colleges, more traditional approaches in which TVET teachers’ engagement in research has almost been ignored. Inconsistency in educational policymaking (unstable policy direction) hampered a consensus-based, national education system including TVET, structuring of TVET starting from the scratch. TVET is implemented without a strong foundation – administratively and manpower and materials/facilities (lack well-crafted implementation strategy), more a product of political than of collective decisions. From the study it appears that lacking proper alignment with employment capacity of the economy is a systemic problem of the TVET system. Enforcement of TVET strategy on TVET teachers and administrators without understanding the new competence-based education, which affected their perception. TVET teachers regarded as implementers of a decision rather than having a stake in the issue, affecting their actions and training outcome. Competence-based education and training (CBET) is practiced in TVET but the instruction and practical components lack alignment with CBET principles (no strong learning environments). Though it requires further evidence, the positive relationship between ‘competentiveness’ of a TVET program and graduates’ job performance found in this study supports the assertion that CBET bridges the gap between classroom learning and labor market reality. Because TVET teacher training programs are not aligned with TVET curriculum and teachers professional needs, it is difficult to say that TVET teachers are well prepared in terms of CBET requirement. In TVET teacher training programs, competence development focused instructional practices are not well fostered in practice. TVET teachers TPD activities are more conventional, not aligned with CBET and teachers’ needs. A number of recommendations are forwarded to improve the implementation of competence-based TVET which have policy implications for future development of TVET and practical interventions to be taken to improve the implementation of competence-based TVET in its different dimensions.

Export is increasingly seen as an important route for entrepreneurial firms to realize their growth potential. Consequently, a better understanding of the determinant factors for export performance of the firm is of great importance for firms’ success and expansion in the export markets. In this context, international business competence (IBC) is an essential intangible strategic resource that engenders export performance of the firm. This thesis studies the relationships between international business competence and export performance in a developing country context. The thesis shows that IBC comprises a number of specific competence domains; hence, in order to strengthen the said competitive advantages and achieve enhanced export performance, firms need to have suitable IBCs to the context in which they are operating. Furthermore, the thesis shows that IBCs influence each other’s effects, and organizational learning orientation strengthens the effects of the various IBCs. The thesis generally argues that firms need to develop the required competencies in their context to increase export performance, but if this would be exclusively based on the direct relationships between the competencies and export performance, results may be suboptimal. Thus, they need to maintain the optimal balance between their competencies on the one hand, and establish and maintain higher levels of organizational learning orientations on the other hand. The thesis implies that studies that ignore the interaction between different competencies and which do not include contextual factors in the examination provide an incomplete and simplistic picture of the relationship between international business competencies and export performance.

Sub-Saharan Africa countries face the challenge of reducing rural poverty and reversing the declining trends of agricultural productivity and the high levels of soil nutrient depletion. Despite of numerous efforts and investments, high levels of poverty and resource degradation persist in African agriculture. The Millennium Development Goals Report (MDGR) states that the majority of people living below the poverty line of $1.25 a day belong to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia. About two thirds of the global rural population lives in mixed crop-livestock systems (CLS), typical of SSA, where interactions between crops and livestock activities are important for the subsistence of smallholders. CLS are characterized by high degree of biophysical and economic heterogeneity, complex and diversified production system that frequently involves a combination of several subsistence and cash crops and livestock. Increasing crop productivity is clearly a key element to improve living standards and to take these people out of poverty. However, agricultural productivity in most of SSA has been stagnant or increased slowly. In addition, the likely negative impacts of climate change on agriculture have accentuated the vulnerability of smallholders. The international research community has once more the eyes on SSA with the recently proposed post-2015 MDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals that emphasize the need to achieve sustainable development globally by 2030 by promoting economic development, environmental sustainability, good governance and social inclusion. Governments and scientists are making considerable efforts to develop strategies that include structural transformations of the different sectors of the economy in search of the recipe to achieve the SDGs. Most of these strategies are based on policy and technology interventions that seek to achieve the “win-win” outcomes and move from the usual “tradeoffs” between poverty-productivity-sustainability to synergies. A key message of this thesis is that achieving the goal of sustainable development in semi-subsistence African agriculture will require better understanding of the poverty-productivity-sustainability puzzle: why high poverty and resource degradation levels persist in African agriculture. I hypothesize that the answer to this puzzle lies, at least in part, in understanding and appropriately analyzing key features of semi-subsistence crop-livestock systems (CLS) typical of Sub-Saharan Africa. The complexity and diversity of CLS often constrain the ability of policy or technology interventions to achieve a “win-win” outcome of simultaneously reducing poverty while increasing productivity sustainably (i.e., avoiding soil nutrient losses). This thesis focuses on the Machakos Region in Kenya. Machakos has been the center of many studies looking at soil fertility issues and its implications for poverty and food security, including the well-known study by Tiffen et al. (1994). Recently, the Government of Kenya developed the Kenya Vision 2030, a long-term development strategy designed to guide the country to meet the 2015 MDGs and beyond. The agricultural sector is recognized as one of the economic actors that can lead to reduce poverty if appropriate policies are in place. For the Vision 2030, the key is to improve smallholder productivity and promote non-farm opportunities. The Vision 2030 was used to assess if the implementation of some of the proposed plans and policies can lead to a sustainable agriculture for smallholders in the Machakos region. This thesis describes and uses the Tradeoff Analysis Model (TOA), an integrated modeling approach designed to deal with the complexities associated to production systems such as the CLS and at the same time, quantify economic and sustainability indicators for policy tradeoff analysis (e.g., poverty indexes and measures of sustainability). The TOA was linked to Representative Agricultural Pathways and Scenarios to represent different future socio-economic scenarios (based on the Vision 2030) to assess the impacts of policy interventions aimed to move agricultural systems towards meeting sustainable development goals. One important finding is that the complex behavior of CLS has important implications for the effectiveness of policy interventions. The Machakos analysis provides important findings regarding the implementation and effectiveness of policy interventions addressing poverty and sustainability in Africa and other parts of the developing world. The analysis shows that policy interventions tend to result in much larger benefits for better-endowed farms, implying that farm heterogeneity results in differential policy impacts and that resilience of agricultural systems is likely to be highly variable and strongly associated with heterogeneity in bio-physical and economic conditions. The results shows that a combination of these interventions and strategies, based on the GoK Vision 2030 and the Machakos County plans, could solve the poverty-productivity-sustainability puzzle in this region. The pathway from tradeoffs to synergies (win-win) seems to be feasible if these interventions and strategies are well implemented, however the analysis also shows that some villages may respond better to these strategies than others. The analysis suggests that these interventions may actually benefit most the areas with better initial endowments of soils and climate. The analysis also suggested that prices (e.g., maize price) play a key role in the assessment of policy interventions. There is an increasing recognition that analysis of economic and environmental outcomes of agricultural production systems requires a bottom-up linkage from the farm to market, as well as top-down linkage from market to farm. Hence, a two-way linkage between the TOA model and a partial equilibrium market model (ME) was developed. The TOA model links site-specific bio-physical process models and economic decision models, and aggregate economic and environmental outcomes to a regional scale, but treats prices as exogenous. The resulting TOA-ME allows the effects of site-specific interactions at the farm scale to be aggregated and used to determine market equilibrium. This in turn, can be linked back to the underlying spatial distribution of economic and environmental outcomes at market equilibrium quantities and prices. The results suggest that market equilibrium is likely to be important in the analysis of agricultural systems in developing countries where product and input markets are not well integrated, and therefore, local supply determines local prices (e.g., high transport costs may cause farm-gate prices be set locally) or where market supply schedules are driven not only by prices but also by changes in farm characteristics in response to policy changes, environmental conditions or socio-economic conditions. The results suggest that the market equilibrium price associated to a policy intervention could be substantially different than the prices observed without the market equilibrium analysis, and consequently could play an important role in evaluating the impacts of policy or technology interventions. As mentioned above, climate change poses a long-term threat for rural households in vulnerable regions like Sub-Saharan Africa. Policy and technology interventions can have different impacts under climate change conditions. In this thesis the likely economic and environmental impacts of climate change and adaptations on the agricultural production systems of Machakos are analyzed. Climate change impact assessment studies have moved towards the use of more integrated approaches and the use of scenarios to deal with the uncertainty of future condition. However, several studies fall short of adequately incorporating adaptation in the analysis, they also fall short of adequately assessing distributional economic and environmental impacts. Similarly, climate change is likely to change patterns of supply and demand of commodities with a consequent change in prices that could play an important role in designing policies at regional, national and international levels. Therefore, a market equilibrium model should also be incorporated in the analysis to assess how markets react to changing prices due to shifts in supply and demand of commodities. The TOA-ME was used to incorporate the elements mentioned above to assess the impacts of climate change. Using data from 5 Global Circulation Models (GCMs) with three emission scenarios (SRES, 2000) to estimate the climate change projections, these projections were used to perturb weather data used by a crop simulation model to estimate the productivity effects of climate change. Land use change and impacts on poverty and nutrient depletion at the market equilibrium were then assessed using the TOA-ME model. The simulation was carried out for three scenarios, which are a combination of socio-economic and climate change scenarios: a baseline scenario that represents current socio-economic conditions and climate conditions, a climate change and current socio-economic scenarios (i.e., future climate change with no policy or technology intervention), and a climate change and future socio economic conditions which are a consequence of rural development policies. Our findings show that in this particular case, the changes on precipitation, temperature and solar radiation do not show a significant difference among the selected emission scenarios. However, the variability is significant across GCMs. The effects of climate change on crop productivity are negative on average. These results show that policy and technology interventions are needed to reduce this region’s vulnerability. Furthermore, the socio-economic scenarios based on policy and technology interventions presented in the case study would be effective to offset the negative effect of climate change on the sustainability (economical and environmental) of the system across a range of possible climate outcomes represented by different GCMs. Finally, the results show that ignoring market equilibrium analysis can lead to biased results and incorrect information for policy making, in particular for the scenario based on policy and technology interventions. One of the major conclusions of the thesis are that policy interventions aimed to deal with poverty and sustainability can have unintended consequences if they are not accompanied by a set of policy strategies and investments. For example, increasing the maize price can result in substitution from subsistence crops to maize, without much increase in nutrient inputs, thus increasing soil nutrient losses. The analysis shows that improving soil nutrient balances by increasing fertilizer and manure use is critically important, but is not enough to move the system to a sustainable path. There is no one factor that can reverse the negative nutrient balances and move the system towards sustainability. Rather, a broad-based strategy is required that stimulates rural development, increases farm size to a sustainable level, and also reduces distortions and inefficiencies in input and output markets that tend to discourage the use of sustainable practices. The Machakos case shows that a combination of these interventions and strategies, based on the GoK Vision 2030 and the Machakos County plans, could solve the poverty-productivity-sustainability puzzle in this region.

The report is the result of a research among women's organisations in the civil society of South-Kivu.

The report is the result of a research among women's organisations in the civil society of South-Kivu.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of Meserete Kristos Church – Relief and Development Association (MKC-RDA) in Ethiopia is a partner of Tear Fund and ICCO under the ICCO Alliance. It assesses MKC-RDA’s efforts to strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and for this exercise it used the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which EKHC contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain EKHC’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

Item does not contain fulltext Certification of coffee producers is frequently suggested as a promising strategy for improving the position of smallholder farmers in the market. After the launch of the first Fairtrade label in 1988, several other standards have been promoted either by voluntary agencies (Utz-certified) or by private coffee companies. Each coffee label relies on different strategies for enhancing sustainable production and responsible trade. Coffee certification in East Africa is of a rather recent nature but has been rapidly expanding, representing currently 26 percent of the world's sustainable certified coffee supply. Marketing channels, cooperative organisation and household structures show notable differences between Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. Empirical studies on the effects of standards for smallholders are scarce. This book intends to deepen our understanding on the role and functions of coffee certification regimes, based on three innovative approaches: (1) longitudinal field survey data capturing changes in coffee farming systems and effects on household welfare; (2) in-depth interviews and behavioural experiments regarding risk attitudes, trust and investments at cooperative level; and (3) detailed discourse analyses regarding gender roles and female bargaining power within coffee households. The chapters included in this book provide new and original evidence about the impact of coffee certification based on large-scale field surveys and in-depth interviews. 262 p.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of Ethiopian Kale Heywit Church (EKHC) in Ethiopia is a partner of Tear Fund Netherlands under the ICCO Alliance. It assesses EKHC’s efforts to strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia based upon the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which EKHC contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain EKHC’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of Meserete Kristos Church – Relief and Development Association (MKC-RDA) in Ethiopia is a partner of Tear Fund and ICCO under the ICCO Alliance. It assesses MKC-RDA’s efforts to strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and for this exercise it used the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which EKHC contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain EKHC’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

The Africa Agribusiness Academy (AAA) supports African SME agrifood companies in growing their business. An AAA member companies can enhance knowledge, skills and expertise, and get support in accessing finance and markets. By the end of 2014, AAA had 200 members in five countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda. These members are in the business of sourcing from or supplying to farmers. AAA’s goal is that by stimulating business growth of the SMEs it indirectly supports business growth of the farmers that are linked to these companies.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Ethiopian Education for Development Association (EfDA) that is a partner of Edukans Foundation under the Connect4Change (C4C) Consortium. It assesses EfDA’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and it used the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which EfDA contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain EfDA’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

Thesis title: Institutional Change and Economic Development: Evidence from Natural and Artefactual Field Experiments in Ethiopia Mequanint Biset Melesse Abstract Institutions are the essential underpinning of economic development. A large volume of empirical literature has documented conclusive evidence supporting this hypothesis. Yet, our knowledge on how to bring about institutional change and improvement is still quite imperfect. Moreover, putting in place good institutions that have undergirded the growth of the developed world has not always produced desired results in developing countries. This thesis studies the complex relationship between institutional change and economic development. Its primary focus is on the endogenous formation of institutions and outcomes of institutional changes on the quality and sustainability of other institutions and the dynamics of economic development. It employs randomized field experiments, propensity score matching and instrumental variables approaches to tackle the problem of causal inference. The results indicate that an effective institutional development requires a good knowledge of the interaction between formal and informal institutions and the complex dynamics that such interaction entails. Customary institutions are malleable. Local institutions condition the success and effects of formal institutional changes in important ways. Institutional change is a nonlinear, complex and non-ergodic process, where multiple intended and unintended outcomes are possible. Overall, the results indicate that formal and informal institutions interact out of entrenched corners with both constructive and deleterious repercussions for economic development.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Research Inspired Policy and Practice Learning in Ethiopia and the Nile Region (RiPPLE) that is a partner of the WASH alliance. It assesses RiPPLE’s efforts towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and it used the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which RiPPLE contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain RiPPLE’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Ethiopian Organisation for Social Services for AIDS (OSSA) that is a partner of Cordaid. It assesses OSSA’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia using the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which OSSA contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain OSSA’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

The opportunities for vegetable seed sales in Ethiopia are derived from the size and type of the product market. The product market for vegetables in Ethiopia has been growing rapidly, both in terms of crop portfolio, as well as size.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the African Development Aid Organisation (ADAA) that is a partner of Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland (SKN). It assesses ADAA’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and it uses the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which ADAA contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain OSSA’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

The opportunities for vegetable seed sales in Ethiopia are derived from the size and type of the product market. The product market for vegetables in Ethiopia has been growing rapidly, both in terms of crop portfolio, as well as size.

In Kenya, bananas and Irish potatoes are important staple crops. In the early 1990s, the crops were devastated by plant diseases resulting in immensely declined productivity and vulnerability of smallholder farmers. To address this problem, disease resistant varieties and tissue culture technology were introduced through partnerships. This thesis examines the working of these partnerships in the process of selecting, multiplying and disseminating improved planting materials under changeable and sometimes unanticipated social and material conditions, and whether this enabled technical change. The study describes how partnerships shape and manage technical change and how distributed task groups coordinate their actions. Partnerships organise and set in motion an evolving chain of sequential socio-technical practices, which incrementally generate technical change. Hence, partnerships are more than just an organisational tool for resource augmentation. Making partnerships work requires constant handling of the politics of selection procedures, the unanticipated consequences of material and technical problems, and the governance and control dimensions of team and group work. The study highlights the often hidden processes coordinating distributed skills and competences and the micro-politics of selection and performance as core elements for making partnerships work. The technographic approach made this visible in the performance of research teams, laboratories and collectively managed nurseries of multiplication sites. The study concludes that partnerships, as an organisational fix, are not a panacea for complicated problems, and a more thorough debate about the conditions under which partnerships may work – and for whom – is needed.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the African Development Aid Organisation (ADAA) that is a partner of Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland (SKN). It assesses ADAA’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and it uses the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which ADAA contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain OSSA’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

In Kenya, bananas and Irish potatoes are important staple crops. In the early 1990s, the crops were devastated by plant diseases resulting in immensely declined productivity and vulnerability of smallholder farmers. To address this problem, disease resistant varieties and tissue culture technology were introduced through partnerships. This thesis examines the working of these partnerships in the process of selecting, multiplying and disseminating improved planting materials under changeable and sometimes unanticipated social and material conditions, and whether this enabled technical change. The study describes how partnerships shape and manage technical change and how distributed task groups coordinate their actions. Partnerships organise and set in motion an evolving chain of sequential socio-technical practices, which incrementally generate technical change. Hence, partnerships are more than just an organisational tool for resource augmentation. Making partnerships work requires constant handling of the politics of selection procedures, the unanticipated consequences of material and technical problems, and the governance and control dimensions of team and group work. The study highlights the often hidden processes coordinating distributed skills and competences and the micro-politics of selection and performance as core elements for making partnerships work. The technographic approach made this visible in the performance of research teams, laboratories and collectively managed nurseries of multiplication sites. The study concludes that partnerships, as an organisational fix, are not a panacea for complicated problems, and a more thorough debate about the conditions under which partnerships may work – and for whom – is needed.

For a long time the Netherlands has provided support to dairy development in the East African countries Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Most of this support has been provided through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the successive development departments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The support in most cases was aiming at a propoor approach, with a focus on supporting smallholder farmers.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Ethiopian Education for Development Association (EfDA) that is a partner of Edukans Foundation under the Connect4Change (C4C) Consortium. It assesses EfDA’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and it used the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which EfDA contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain EfDA’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Jerusalem Children and Community Development Organisation (JeCCDO) that is a partner of Edukans Foundation under the ICCO alliance. It assesses JeCCDO’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia using the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which JeCCDO contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain JeCCDO’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Jerusalem Children and Community Development Organisation (JeCCDO) that is a partner of Edukans Foundation under the ICCO alliance. It assesses JeCCDO’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia using the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which JeCCDO contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain JeCCDO’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of Ethiopian Kale Heywit Church (EKHC) in Ethiopia is a partner of Tear Fund Netherlands under the ICCO Alliance. It assesses EKHC’s efforts to strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia based upon the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which EKHC contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain EKHC’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

For a long time the Netherlands has provided support to dairy development in the East African countries Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia. Most of this support has been provided through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the successive development departments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The support in most cases was aiming at a propoor approach, with a focus on supporting smallholder farmers.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Ethiopian Rural Self-Help Association (ERSHA) that is a partner of ICCO and IICD under the Connect4Change (C4C) Consortium. It assesses ERSHA’s contribution towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia based upon the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which ERSHA contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain ERSHA’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.

This report is one of the results of the ‘Sanitation Marketing in Equateur Province’ project in RDC, in which Wageningen UR and Oxfam Great Britain (Oxfam GB) work together. • It Describes the characteristics of different governance arrangements that address sanitation problems in Gemena in terms of actors involved and decision-making process and power; •Assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these different governance arrangements in solving collective problems in the field of sanitation, and •Presents different policy propositions on how to create more enabling governance arrangements for the sustainable provision of sanitation services.

The Africa Agribusiness Academy (AAA) supports African SME agrifood companies in growing their business. An AAA member companies can enhance knowledge, skills and expertise, and get support in accessing finance and markets. By the end of 2014, AAA had 200 members in five countries: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia and Rwanda. These members are in the business of sourcing from or supplying to farmers. AAA’s goal is that by stimulating business growth of the SMEs it indirectly supports business growth of the farmers that are linked to these companies.

Certification of coffee producers is frequently suggested as a promising strategy for improving the position of smallholder farmers in the market. After the launch of the first Fairtrade label in 1988, several other standards have been promoted either by voluntary agencies (Utz-certified) or by private coffee companies. Each coffee label relies on different strategies for enhancing sustainable production and responsible trade. Coffee certification in East Africa is of a rather recent nature but has been rapidly expanding, representing currently 26 percent of the world's sustainable certified coffee supply. Marketing channels, cooperative organisation and household structures show notable differences between Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. Empirical studies on the effects of standards for smallholders are scarce. This book intends to deepen our understanding on the role and functions of coffee certification regimes, based on three innovative approaches: (1) longitudinal field survey data capturing changes in coffee farming systems and effects on household welfare; (2) in-depth interviews and behavioural experiments regarding risk attitudes, trust and investments at cooperative level; and (3) detailed discourse analyses regarding gender roles and female bargaining power within coffee households. The chapters included in this book provide new and original evidence about the impact of coffee certification based on large-scale field surveys and in-depth interviews.

This report describes the findings of the end line assessment of the Research Inspired Policy and Practice Learning in Ethiopia and the Nile Region (RiPPLE) that is a partner of the WASH alliance. It assesses RiPPLE’s efforts towards strengthening Civil Society in Ethiopia and it used the CIVICUS analytical framework. It is a follow-up of a baseline study conducted in 2012. Key questions that are being answered comprise changes in the five CIVICUS dimensions to which RiPPLE contributed; the nature of its contribution; the relevance of the contribution made and an identification of factors that explain RiPPLE’s role in civil society strengthening. The evaluation was commissioned by NWO-WOTRO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in the Netherlands and is part of the programmatic evaluation of the Co-Financing System - MFS II financed by the Dutch Government, whose overall aim is to strengthen civil society in the South as a building block for structural poverty reduction. Apart from assessing impact on MDGs, the evaluation also assesses the contribution of the Dutch Co-Funding Agencies to strengthen the capacities of their Southern Partners, as well as the contribution of these partners towards building a vibrant civil society arena.