Empowering Smallholder Farms: Innovations and Challenges in Rwandan Agriculture

In the latest episode of the collaboration between Yale’s Economic Growth Center and VoxDev, host Catherine Cheney discusses one of Africa’s most persistent development challenges: the low productivity of smallholder farmers. Despite decades of investment, innovation, and policy reform, yields on African small farms remain significantly below those in high-income countries. While the limitations of smallholder models, that doesn’t mean that the problem is easy to solve, not least because the way that land is owned my make consolidation impossible. The result: fewer opportunities for structural transformation and rural development.

Catherine is joined by Gérardine Mukeshimana, former Minister of Agriculture in Rwanda, Christopher Udry of Northwestern University and Mark Rosenzweig of Yale University.