Weather index-based crop insurance is increasingly becoming important as a risk mitigation strategy that farmers may use to mitigate adverse climate shocks and natural disasters encountered during farming. While Europe, North America, and Asia account for 20.1%, 55%, and 19.5% of the total agricultural insurance premium worldwide, respectively, Africa accounts for only 0.5% of the world insurance industry. One of the key reasons advanced against the low index insurance participation rate in Africa is the failure to involve farm households at the initial conceptualization and design of pilot initiatives. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to design an improved participatory methodology that could help elicit information on the value placed by farm households in Southwestern Burkina Faso on a new weather index-based crop insurance management initiative. A key concept in the improved participatory methodology is that of the willingness to pay (WTP) of farm households for the scheme. Knowledge of the maximum amount that farmers are willing to pay for the scheme can help insurance policy providers and public policy makers to design and put in place measures that sustain index insurance schemes in a developing country context and improve welfare among participating farmers.
West African marine ecosystems are very productive and sustain important fisheries that have developed rapidly in the last decades. The analysis of the fishing impact on exploited resources is usually conducted through single-species assessments. In this study, we propose a complementary approach that enables to account for some ecosystem effects of fishing. In Guinea and Senegal, fisheries have developed relatively recently and at the same time, the collection of landings and surveys data has been carried out. In consequence, the data collection extends from a period where stocks could be considered as non exploited to a situation of overexploitation. This case study is analysed in order to detect shifts in the ecosystem structure in response to increasing fishing pressure. To this aim, trophic spectra and long time series of mean trophic level are examined for demersal fish communities. Trophic spectra display either the distribution of the demersal community biomass or the commercial catches according to trophic level classes. Some substantial and statistically significant changes in the trophic structure of the Senegal and Guinea ecosystems were observed. In particular, the biomass of the high trophic levels decreased whereas the lower trophic levels displayed a relative stability or an increase. This could be linked to a "top-down" fishing effect due to a release of predation on the lower trophic levels of the demersal fish community. In Senegal, the mean trophic level decreased significantly for both the catches and the demersal community biomass. Such a decrease was also observed for the coastal demersal biomass in Guinea. This showed that fishing activities had an impact on the trophic structure of the ecosystem, and a "fishing down marine food web" effect was shown in West Africa for the first time.
The desire to increase energy access remains a strong driving force for poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries. The supply of modern energy facilitates the improvement of human living conditions and the productivity of sectors. It also contributes by reducing the time spent, mainly for women and children, in collecting biomass and therefore can provide an opportunity for an increase in the education level of children and for women empowerment. This paper shows how renewable energy facilitates the improvement of the standard of living in a Sahelian developing country of Senegal. Using a life-cycle-cost approach while integrating an assessment of the environmental externalities, I argue that in remote rural areas where grid-connection is non-existent, photovoltaic (PV) renewable technologies provide suitable solutions for delivering energy services although wind technology has been considered as well. In this framework, policies promoting the adoption of clean technologies in developing nations like Sen-egal could be considered as being the main components on the agenda of poverty reduction.
In recent time, yields from cocoa producing states have been decreasing while farmers are faced with a number of challenges that predispose them to risks and uncertainties. The study therefore assessed the major production and marketing risks in Ondo State, Nigeria. The socioeconomic characteristics of the cocoa farmers were analysed using descriptive analysis while Kruskal-Wallis ranking analysis was used to assess the farmer's perception on sources of risks. Ranking on top of the ten identified cocoa production risks was pest and diseases attack while undue exploitation by exporters ranked on top of marketing risks. The major coping strategies adopted by the farmers of the cocoa include diversification of production system by growing substitute crops (47.5 %), and involvement in non-farm business to generate additional income (35.0 %). In other to reduce risks faced by the farmers, government should put in place a marketing scheme aimed at assisting cocoa farmers through price regulation and monitoring. Cocoa farmers also needed to be introduced to the current technologies of production with the provision of necessary incentives such as improved varieties of cocoa seedling, as well as provision of fertiliser and approved pesticides, financial assistance, and simple processing technologies that produce standard cocoa beans.
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