Growth and Productivity in Agriculture and Agribusiness : Evaluative Lessons from World Bank Group Experience

Abstract

The World Bank Group has a unique
 opportunity to match the increases in financing for
 agriculture with a sharper focus on improving agricultural
 growth and productivity in agriculture-based economies,
 notably in Sub-Saharan Africa. Greater effort will be needed
 to connect sectoral interventions and achieve synergies from
 public and private sector interventions; to build capacity
 and knowledge exchange; to take stock of experience in
 rain-fed agriculture; to ensure attention to financial
 sustainability and to cross-cutting issues of gender,
 environmental, and social impacts and climate; and to better
 integrate the World Bank Group support at the global and
 regional levels with that at the country level. This
 evaluation uses the typology of economies developed by the
 Agriculture for Development: World Development Report 2008
 as one classification in its analysis. In the
 agriculture-based category, which includes most of
 Sub-Saharan Africa, development of the agriculture sector is
 essential to growth and poverty reduction, yet productivity
 is low, constrained by limited access to modern inputs,
 irrigation, communication, and transport. The World Bank
 Group support focused on alleviating these constraints is
 important to help achieve poverty reduction.