In: Irrigated Urban Vegetable Production in Ghana - Characteristics, Benefits and Risks by Emmanuel Obuobie, Bernard Keraita, George Danso, Philip Amoah, Olufunke O. Cofie, Liqa Raschid-Sally and Pay

In: Irrigated Urban Vegetable Production in Ghana - Characteristics, Benefits and Risks by Emmanuel Obuobie, Bernard Keraita, George Danso, Philip Amoah, Olufunke O. Cofie, Liqa Raschid-Sally and Pay

Yves Cabannes

In: Cities Farming for the Future - Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities

Financial support can make a significant difference to poor urban families. Many of the increasing group of urban dwellers who live around the poverty line are (informal) micro-entrepreneurs, involved in a diversity of activities such as waste collection and recycling, trading, having a shop, transport and farming. These entrepreneurs require access to working capital, but most of them face limited access to credit and investment schemes. Important lesson can be drawn from rural micro-finance programmes. The challenge now is to further build on these experiences, including (partnerships with) the private banking sector and rural innovative micro-finance institutions. This chapter reviews lessons learnt from studies in the urban setting.

René van Veenhuizen

In: Cities Farming for the Future - Urban Agriculture for Green and Productive Cities

Attention to urban agriculture has increased markedly during the last couple of decades. The number of activities to promote urban agriculture at international, national and local level has grown, but urban farmers in many cities in the world still struggle to get their main survival strategy recognised by city authorities. The demand of policy makers and local practitioners for inspiring examples of successful policies and actions in cities is therefore growing. Urban agriculture contributes to a wide variety of urban issues and is increasingly being accepted and used as a tool in sustainable city development. Currently the challenge is its integration into city planning and facilitation of its multiple benefits for urban inhabitants. This book seeks to present the current state of affairs regarding urban agriculture and sustainable urban development.

Proceedings of the MDP/IDRC workshop on the political economy of urban and peri-urban agriculture in Eastern and Southern Africa compiled by Shingiraj Mushamba.

Bronte Hotel, Harare, Zimbabwe, February 28 - March 2, 2001

Organised by the Municipal Development Programme for Eastern and Southern Africa (MDP-ESA) in collaboration with IDRC. The workshop focused on the political economy of urban agriculture, in recognition of the important role it plays: access to resources such as peri-urban land and water are key to determining who practices urban agriculture and who benefits. Secure access to land and water is influenced not only by urban legislation and landuse planning, but also by the range of formal and informal rules, institutions and processes that determine access to and use of resources, and through which competition and negotiation over resources occur. Understanding these processes can assist in establishing political processes and institutions which enable stakeholders to resolve potential conflicts over access to resources.

Financing and Investment for Urban Agriculture
Yves Cabannes

This paper has been published in: Cities Farming for the Future, Urban Agriculture for Green and Sustainable Cities. Edited by René van Veenhuizen. Published by RUAF, IDRC and IIRR.

Extension, Marketing and Credit Services, introduced by: Henk de Zeeuw (ETC-RUAF, Leusden, The Netherlands)

In: Annotated Bibliography on Urban Agriculture

Economic Impacts, introduced by: Rachel Nugent (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, United States)

In: Annotated Bibliography on Urban Agriculture