Objective
Half of the world's extreme poor or over 430 million people live in Sub-Saharan Africa. The vast majority live in rural areas and work in agriculture, where productivity is desperately low. This keeps welfare low now and in the future as agricultural productivity increases are seen as a condition for both structural transformation and to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This is the motivation for bringing the green revolution which has so far bypassed the continent to Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the logic being compelling, the results from a decade of research on technology adoption in African agriculture have been largely disappointing. Interventions aimed at increasing farmers ability to invest in inputs to produce more of what they already do have not proven transformative. In this research proposal, I will investigate a complementary explanation why income and productivity in African agriculture remain low: it is what farmers produce precisely the quality and value added of their output that keeps them poor, and they produce low quality because there is no demand for smallholders to produce high quality or higher value-added outputs. As low quality limits price and thus farmers' potential income, missing markets for quality can help explain the low returns to farming. At the core of this research proposal is the hypothesis that markets for quality are missing because of a fundamental information problem: quality is a difficult to observe characteristic. I will rely on three multi-wave randomized controlled field trials to study technological and institutional solutions to overcome this information problem, which hamper demand for high quality products in the export market (work package I) and at home (work package II). In the final work package, I will complete the cycle and study how increases in demand for high quality outputs, and access to high quality inputs, can jump-start a green revolution in rural Africa.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences political sciences political transitions revolutions
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-ADG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
10691 Stockholm
Sweden
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.