Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This proposal is directed to the Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction theme. Resource scarcity is at the centre of the new geopolitics of growth and development. In global markets, scarcities have been felt in the forms of food price hikes and rising and volatile oil prices. Many investors have responded by acquiring large tracts of land in African countries in order to secure a new base from which to supply growing markets, often changing land uses and displacing existing populations in the process. There is growing evidence that this can threaten existing efforts to alleviate poverty and undermine geopolitical stability, as competition grows over access to and control of natural resources, particularly land and water on which to produce food, fuel, feed and fibre. This trend is most marked in sub-Saharan Africa, where land rights are often inadequately recognised and protected. These same countries are hungry for investment, seeing it as essential for growth, yet substantial evidence now shows that African governments are not concluding the most advantageous deals possible, leading to costs at both the local and national levels. This situation raises an urgent policy question: how can the new land investments driven by perceptions of rising global resource scarcity be used as opportunities to promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality in developing countries? This project presumes that the outcomes of such investments are contingent on their terms and the institutional arrangements that structure them. We therefore propose research that investigates the different institutional arrangements and associated business models for such investments, their respective impacts on livelihoods and resource utilisation and, beyond local level impacts, their implications for land use planning and agrarian transformation in three countries in Africa: Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. The purpose of the research is to determine what forms of investment can best promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality, while also improving the productive utilisation of natural resources for national development. Five sets of questions - elaborated further below - will frame the research: 1. Global drivers and resource scarcity: what narratives of resource scarcity are driving the new land deals and how are these understood by different actors in these deals? 2. Mapping land deals in Africa: Where are land deals happening, what forms do the deals take, who is acquiring the land, and what rights are they acquiring? 3. Historical experiences: Wwhat are the national histories of experiences with large-scale land acquisitions for agriculture, what changes in broad agrarian structures are emerging, and are these new forms of agrarian capitalism or repeats of the past? 4. Institutional arrangements: What are the pre-existing national and local institutional arrangements, what new institutional arrangements are emerging or have been established through new land deals and what forms of accumulation do these promote? 5. Livelihood impacts: What are the livelihood and food security impacts of different kinds of land transactions and institutional arrangements on rural communities, and how are these impacts socially differentiated?

This project is directed at the Agriculture and Growth theme. In this project we will investigate how agricultural development can contribute to non-farm employment in rural areas in low-income and developing countries. A strong non-farm sector is a key aspect of sustainable rural development - especially when many do not have land and are not involved in agricultural production, and where land investments or productivity increases may lead to people being displaced out of agriculture. Yet while policymakers have long been aware of the importance of non-farm employment, they often press ahead with agricultural development plans without considering these impacts, and regularly simply assume that people who are leaving the land will automatically find employment elsewhere. It is however becoming clear that such automatic re-employment does not happen, and that increases in agricultural productivity, even where they lead to greater incomes for farmers, do not automatically stimulate non-farm employment. The links between agricultural growth and non-farm employment are not clearly understood. It has long been assumed that agricultural growth benefits non-farm employment by increasing the local demand from farmers and farm workers for goods and services, but history shows that this is not always the case. The employment benefits of agricultural growth depend on many factors -- including, crucially, the spatial organization of production, processing and marketing, and the nature of the value chains that link farmers to local and distant markets, as consumers and as producers. If these forms of organization bypass local markets, agricultural development can lead to links with distant markets being strengthened, while not contributing to the local economy. In the context of increased pressure on agricultural land, these questions are becoming increasingly important in many parts of the world. This is so particularly in Southern Africa where rural development is being affected by a host of pressures, including competition for agricultural land, the political saliency of land reform and small farmer development, and the increasing power of supermarkets. A better understanding is needed of the spatial and institutional factors that support employment-intensive rural development. PLAAS aims to address these questions by doing case study research in three countries where these issues are pressing: South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It will consider dynamics both of low-income countries (Zimbabwe and Malawi) and more 'advanced' ones (South Africa). Here, it will apply an innovative methodological approach: instead of trying to capture all these complex linkages by constructing a social accounting matrix (which has expensive data requirements and cannot capture the spatial linkages involved) the study will focus on carefully mapping actual resource flows between economic actors, 'following the money' by identifying the upstream and downstream connections that link households and enterprises to one another, and iteratively building a map of social and economic networks. It will analyse these networks using software developed for mapping social networks. In a second phase of the study, a household livelihood survey will measure the impact on employment, incomes and food security of women and men. We will use this data to build a detailed understanding of how local economic networks and value chains shape the prospects for non-farm employment. This research will be done in close co-operation with policy-making bodies and planners. The research agenda set out here touches on key issues central to the South African government's new economic growth path as well as NEPAD's Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Plan, and PLAAS will use the data and findings to increase policymakers' understanding of how to support non-farm employment through appropriate approaches to the spatial design of agricultural development.

The objectives of our proposed work are well aligned with the goals for the collaboration between the Global Health EDCTP3 and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) joint undertaking under Topic GH-EDCTP3-2022-CALL1-02-02. The participants listed in this proposal are key members of the Africa Pathogen Genomics Initiative (Africa PGI) and the Global Health Network (tGHN). The participants will leverage these two existing platforms to provide access to expertise and resources in genomics (from AfPGI) and clinical trials research and data science (from tGHN) to EDCTP grantees in genomic epidemiology (hereafter referred to as EDCTP grantees) to be selected under Topic GH-EDCTP3-2022-CALL1-01-03. Specifically, the grant funds requested for this project will fund one full-time project manager dedicated to supporting coordination activities between EDCTP grantees and the participants. The project manager will be based at University of the Western Cape and will work closely with Africa CDC (While Africa CDC is not a formal participant in this proposal, (not among the legal entities receiving direct funding) they are core stakeholders and leaders in the project, notably via collaboration with ASLM.) Jointly, these platforms combined with the coordination activities described in this proposal will support as relevant EDCTP3 grantees to implement use-cases in genomic epidemiology and advance the stated objectives above. Over the past four years, we have seen genomic sequencing programs significantly advance and expand in Africa, helping demonstrate that the goals outlined within this project are measurable, verifiable, and realistically achievable.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.