Especially for young people, diverse portfolios for rural populations should be the core part of a well-thought out rural investment strategy, say researchers.

The first results of the Kenyan census conducted in 2019 reveal a gradual demographic transition towards smaller families coupled with a growing urban population.

Still, even for this dynamic African nation that recently rose to ‘middle-income’ status, its future inclusive prosperity and ability to reach the Sustainable Development Goals will depend on how the rural population, most of whom are farmers with a few acres each of rain-fed land, fare in the decade to come.

Rural households are the most vulnerable to the climate crisis because their livelihoods depend on erratic rainfall. Across sub-Saharan Africa, rural areas have higher rates of poverty, illiteracy and child mortality as well as less access to basic services, such as electricity and safe sanitation. The widening gulf between rural and urban zones is fuelling large-scale migration of rural youth to burgeoning African cities.

Governments and development organizations do prioritise agriculture and rural development in their agendas. For example, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme suggests that increasing agricultural performance is the most efficient engine of poverty reduction and food security in the African continent.

This explains why many rural poverty-reduction schemes focus on agricultural technologies, such as investments in improved seeds, fertilizers and natural resource management to close yield gaps and drive a sustainable intensification of African agriculture.

Over 80% of farms in sub-Saharan Africa are under 2 hectares (5 acres) in size. Although adopting new technologies has good economic returns per acre and could improve the resilience of these farmers, the small size of available farmland limits smallholders’ earning potential and makes it impossible to escape poverty purely based on farming.

How can we measure aspirations to facilitate sustainable livelihoods?

Rather than working with assumptions of what rural populations want, policymakers need to be more aware of the diversity of the rural households they serve and listen more closely to those we call ‘farmers’ to better understand their needs and what they aspire to. Aspiration is the strong desire to have or achieve something: an individual’s vision of an ideal yet realistic future.

However, measuring rural household aspirations in a systematic and replicable way to inform development planners is a challenge. Decision-making may fluctuate with the respondents’ moods over time. The way researchers conduct their survey could generate biased answers, where the interviewees express what they think the interviewer may want to hear.

One promising approach that avoids potential researcher bias is a tool called Sensemaker™, developed by Cognitive Edge. This is a survey tool that collects individual narratives and lets the respondents interpret the narratives themselves. The meta-analysis of the narratives combined with other quantitative data helps understand complex changes in a community by revealing patterns in social dynamics across many interviews.

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