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Abstract

As has been recognized by donors and African governments alike in recent years, one of the keys to reducing rural poverty and improving the nutritional status of rural households in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will be to achieve wide-spread improvements in food crop productivity among smallholder farmers. Since the Abuja Declaration of 2006 and the international food price crisis of 2007/08, there has been a resurgence of large government -led fertilizer subsidy programs during this time period across a growing number of SSA countries including Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. In contrast to the government -led input subsidy programs of the pre-structural adjustment era in SSA, which typically took the form of state monopsonistic control of input distribution and a pan-territorial subsidized input price for all buyers, most of the large-scale fertilizer input subsidy programs (ISPs) from 2000 onward have attempted to improve program efficiency (and reduce the overall budget required) by using ‘smart subsidy’ design criteria, as proposed by Morris et al (2007).

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