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While biodiversity and ecosystem services derived from the natural environment are the backbones of West African rural livelihood, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, conflicts, and climate change threaten the continued provision of ecosystem services. This threat creates an urgent need to safeguard the integrity of the environment. Evaluating the effectiveness of environmental conservation projects is central towards designing and scaling-up successful conservation projects. Using secondary literature and project reports, we reviewed ongoing and completed conservation projects in the West African sub-region. Scientific work on incentives for ecosystem services in sub-Saharan Africa typically focuses on Southern and Eastern Africa, leaving Western Africa underserved. This study fills this literature gap by compiling lessons from conservation projects in West Africa to offer region-specific incentives that should inform the design of conservation projects in the region. The study shows that the way forward is a holistic, sustainable development approach that mirrors and meets strategies outlined in Sustainable Development Goals 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, and 17: No Poverty, End Hunger and Promote Sustainable Agriculture, Gender Equality, Decent Work and Economic Growth, Climate Action, and Partnerships for the Goals, respectively.

Climate change and environmental degradation are major threats to sustainable agricultural development in Southern Africa. Thus, the concept of sustainable intensification (SI) has become an important topic among researchers and policymakers in the region over the last three decades. SI involves getting more output from less input using practices such as agroforestry, organic fertilizer, sustainable water management, among others. A comprehensive review of the literature on adoption of SI in the region identified nine relevant drivers of adoption of SI among (smallholder) farmers. These drivers include (i) age, (ii) size of arable land, (iii) education, (iv) extension services, (v) gender, (vi) household size, (vii) income, (viii) membership in a farming organization and (ix) access to credit. We present the results of a meta-analysis of 21 papers on the impact of these determinants on SI adoption among (smallholder) farmers in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) using random-effects estimation techniques for the true effect size. While our results suggest that variables such as extension services, education, age, and household size may influence the adoption of SI in SADC, factors such as access to credit are also of great importance. Decision-makers should, therefore, concentrate efforts on these factors in promoting SI across the SADC. This includes increasing the efficiency of public extension service, as well as the involvement of the private sector in extension services. Furthermore, both public and private agriculture financing models should consider sustainability indicators in their assessment process.

We show how policymakers in developing regions can generate richer insights from using the choice experiment method best‐worst scaling (BWS) method when ranking policy priorities on an importance scale. More specifically, we adopt BWS to provide an update on constraints that limit the participation of Kenyan horticultural smallholder farmers in modern agricultural value chains. In addition to traditional constraints posed by input market failures and missing institutions, we considered constraints such as trust and familiarity with buyers shown by recent empirical studies to inform smallholders’ market choices. Ascertaining the relevance of these constraints highlights our contribution to the existing literature. We find that farmers consistently rate access to high‐quality inputs as their main constraint followed by concerns about access to credit, the high cost of meeting food standards, missing cooperatives, and exploitative intermediaries. Respondents considered insufficient labor, small farmlands, and weak tenure rights as the least important constraints. Age, location, gender, household income, and education influence the relative importance various segments of smallholders place on these constraints. For example, constraints are economic rather than personal for low‐income farmers. Counterintuitively, rural smallholders are less likely to perceive poor transportation network as a constraint. Smallholders’ distrust of buyers they interact with is informed by their location and income. In designing intervention initiatives, policies that focus on segments of smallholders are needed for improving smallholder participation in modern agricultural value chains.

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