Rural Sociologists in the Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This double issue stems from sessions held at the 2016 Congress of the International Rural Sociology Association (IRSA) in Toronto, Canada. To strengthen professional collaboration across Africa, a group of African and Africacentric rural sociologists examined recent policy and program initiatives in African agricultural and rural development. The paper sessions were designed for two purposes: (1) to stimulate the design and implementation of effective rural policies through scientifically sound and critical social analyses; and (2) to demonstrate the roles that rural sociologists in Africa play in that process.The context for these sessions was framed by the Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), an ambitious vision of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) to improve productivity and growth in African agriculture. CAADP was established in July 2003 by the African Union to implement their policy agenda to transform Africa at the country level. Since then, however, CAADP is far from achieving the anticipated results of food and nutritional security.As can be seen in the following articles African rural sociologists are focused on improving the livelihoods of rural populations. Their activities involve the communication, promotion, and analysis of policies implementing the CAADP agenda through government extension systems or NGOs. The analyses range from the introduction and adoption of specific innovations to more broadly focused national government programs to stimulate agricultural productivity of small farmers. True to the practical spirit of rural sociology, these authors go beyond purely academic analyses to assess the local impacts and policy implications for scalable efforts.Characterizing the policy implementation context, Naswem and Ejembi reflect on the history of agricultural extension in one nation, Nigeria. Building on this analysis, they evaluate the potential for revitalization of the Nigerian extension system through Nigeria's most recent agricultural development policy initiative: the Agricultural Transformation Agenda.Mubichi compares policies for the promotion of soybean production in two neighboring countries in southeastern Africa (Malawi and Mozambique). Controlling for agro-ecological conditions, the analysis demonstrates the role of a country's economic policy in translating NEPAD's continent-wide agricultural development effort at the national level. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".