In Kenya, 11 million people suffer from malnourishment. Twenty percent of children younger than five are underweight, and nearly one in three are below normal height. In a typical day, the average Kenyan consumes barely half as many calories as the average American.

But Kenya – and other underfed countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa – have more than enough land to grow the food needed for their hungry populations.

The juxtaposition of food deprivation and land abundance boils down to a failure of national agriculture policies, says Thom Jayne, professor of international development at Michigan State University. Governments haven’t helped small farmers acquire rights to uncultivated land or use the land they own more productively, he said.

Speaking earlier this month at a symposium organized by the Center on Food Security and the Environment, Jayne said lifting African farmers out of poverty will require a new development approach.

The focus, he said, should be on increasing smallholder output and putting idle land to work in the hands of the rural poor.

Much of Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertile land, Jayne explained, falls under the ownership of state governments or wealthy investors who leave large tracts of land unplanted.

Meanwhile, population density in many rural areas exceeds the estimated carrying capacity for rainfed agriculture – approximately 500 persons per square kilometer, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Above this density threshold, farm sizes become so small, farming becomes economically unsustainable.

“As farm size shrinks, it’s increasingly difficult to produce a surplus,” Jayne said. “As it’s difficult to produce a surplus, it becomes difficult to finance investments in fertilizer and other inputs that could help you intensify.”

Agricultural development policies, Jayne said, have exacerbated these problems. One Zambian fertilizer subsidy program, for example, delivered support payments to over 50 percent of farms greater than five hectares in size – but only reached 14 percent of farmers whose holdings measured one hectare or smaller.

“This was a poverty reduction program that was targeted to large farms,” Jayne said. “Where’re the allocations to R&D appropriate to one hectare farms, tsetse fly control, vet services, all the things that are going to make that one hectare farm more productive?”

He stressed that investments in small farms could reduce poverty.

“Fifty to seventy percent of the population in these countries is engaged in agriculture,” he said. “There aren’t very many levers to reduce poverty and get growth processes going except to focus on the activities that that fifty to seventy percent are primarily engaged in.”

Smallholder-based growth strategies delivered stunning results in Green Revolution-era India – while large-farm strategies in Latin American countries have largely failed to alleviate rural poverty, he said.

Symposium commentator Byerlee, a rural policy expert and former lead economist for the World Bank, agreed with Jayne. In particular, Byerlee expressed skepticism about the benefit of large land investments by foreign agricultural interests.

“The social impacts aren’t going to be very much,” he said of the large-scale mechanized farming operations favored by foreign investors.

“They don’t create many jobs,” he said. “That’s really what we should be focusing on in terms of poverty reduction – job creation.”

Byerlee also stressed the need to formalize Sub-Saharan Africa’s land tenure systems. Currently, he said, about eighty percent of Africa’s land is titled informally under “customary” rights.

“When you have this population pressure, and on top of that you have commercial pressures coming in from investors, this system is just not going to stand up,” he said. “If you had better functioning land markets, it could reduce the transaction costs for investors, allow smallholders to access land, and provide an exit strategy for people at the bottom end.”

Jayne suggested reforms and new policies should include mechanisms to help small farmers gain access to unused fertile land. He called for comprehensive audits of land resources in Sub-Saharan African nations, a tax on uncultivated arable acreage, and a transparent public auction to distribute idle state lands to small farmers.

Additionally, he said, governments can help by improving infrastructure in remote rural areas and clearing fertile land of pests – such as tsetse flies – that threaten crops and human health.

But whatever particular policies they choose to pursue, Jayne said, African governments cannot afford to ignore the problems associated with inequitable land distribution and low smallholder agricultural productivity and. Failure to implement broad-based, smallholder-focused growth strategies will result in “major missed opportunities to reduce poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa,” he said.

This was the seventh talk in FSE's Global Food Policy and Food Security Symposium Series.

More than 500,000 people live in Mathare, the second-largest collection of slums in Nairobi, Kenya. Crime and disease ravage the population, and shanties have no electricity or running water. But there’s one piece of technology that everyone seems to have, one which promises to bring much-needed improvements: the cell phone.

Cell phones are central to two of the eight most recent Global Underdevelopment Action Fund projects funded by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Both projects will be led by Joshua Cohen, a professor of political science, philosophy and law and the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society.

The first of Cohen’s projects will examine whether texting private and accurate health advice will increase awareness of risky sexual behavior among Mathare’s younger residents who face high rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Cohen's second project involves teaching women to use mobile technology to meet up with larger groups while traveling at night, which Cohen believes can led to a decrease in the number of assaults, muggings and rapes. Eventually, the hope is that the program can be taken over by Kenya’s police and expanded.

Cell phone charging station in Mathare

Six other projects are receiving support from the third round of Global Underdevelopment Action Fund awards, amounting to a total of $265,000.

The funds will enable multidisciplinary teams led by Stanford faculty from across the university to perform policy-relevant research focused on global underdevelopment challenges.

The funded projects will have real world impact. They will help target tuberculosis, which kills more than 1 million people a year and hinders economic development in the hardest-hit regions, like parts of India. They evaluate the amount of resources necessary to improve test scores and lower anemia rates among China’s rural schoolchildren. They ensure that health care is accessible to people in the Arab world where countries are undergoing political transitions. And they evaluate the challenges and benefits of bringing solar power to areas in Africa where electricity is a rare commodity.

As varied as the eight projects are, each will train Stanford undergraduate or graduate students, stressing the importance that Stanford and FSI place on training the next generation of researchers and policy influencers.

The projects were selected by a faculty committee chaired by Stephen D. Krasner, FSI’s deputy director and the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations.

The Action Fund is supported by FSI donors, matching funds from the Office of the President and FSI. The fund grew out of the institute’s 2010 conference on Technology, Governance, and Global Development. This year’s follow-up conference further showcased FSI’s commitment to challenges posed by global underdevelopment with a focus on food security and health.

The award-winning projects and their principal investigators are:

• Texting for Sexual Health: Effects of Information Provision and Common Knowledge on Health-Seeking Behavior in Kenya
  Joshua Cohen
  In hopes of increasing awareness that could minimize sexual health risks, the team will promote a mobile health counseling service, which will enable young people in Nairobi’s Mathare slums to receive private and reliable answers from health counselors through text messaging.
• Can Mobile Phones Coordinate Community Action to Improve Women’s Safety in Slums?
  Joshua Cohen
  The program uses mobile technology to measure whether the number of assaults on women will decrease if they travel in groups. The project will evaluate whether this “safety in numbers” program can be taken over by Kenyan police.

• Crime, Violence and Governance in Latin America: Sharing Data and Building a Web-Based Research Network to Expand Knowledge
  Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar
  This project will build a systematically organized repository of research on crime, violence and citizen security in Latin America.
• Tuberculosis Control and its Benefits to the Rural Poor
  Jeremy Goldhaber-Fiebert
  This study will determine the impact of improved TB control effects in India, which accounts for 20 percent of global TB incidence, and project economic outcomes from India’s TB epidemic over the next decade.
• Paying for Performance to Improve Health in Rural China: Does Resource Scarcity Breed Innovation in Service Delivery?
  Grant Miller
  This study will evaluate whether large subsidies are necessary for improving social situations like lowering anemia rates or improving test scores.
• Health and Political Reform in the Arab World
  Paul H. Wise
  Partnering with The Lancet journal and the American University of Beirut, the team will produce a series of articles on war, social change and health in the Arab world with a goal of improving health care in countries undergoing political transition.
• Solar Lighting and Phone Charging in East Africa: Understanding Adoption, Business Models and Development Outcomes
  Frank Wolak
  This project will analyze new solar businesses in East Africa. Electricity is central to industry, health services and education, yet 1.5 billion people worldwide lack access. Recently, low-power solar energy sources in homes have appeared as viable options.
• Understanding the Current Status of Medical Technology in Rural China
  Paul Yock
  This study will evaluate the use of medical technology in rural China in order to establish a baseline for future work and establish partnerships. The long-term goal is an analytical framework within which to understand the role of medical technology in Chinese health care.

The November 17 Liberation Technology Seminar was co-hosted by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), a nonpartisan economic policy research organization that unites remarkable economic talent from all parts of Stanford University. This seminar featured four student-led design projects that were created in the Designing Liberation Technologies course taught each spring at Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) by professors' Josh Cohen and Terry Winograd. The class works in partnership with the University of Nairobi's School of Computing and Informatics to develop user-based designs that address outstanding challenges in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya. 

Josh Cohen described the three main elements of the design school class:

(1) There is a focus on user/human-centered design. Projects are designed based on a close engagement with end users: the people who will be using the solutions. (2) Courses are inter-disciplinary. The idea is to take people who are deeply embedded in a certain discipline and put them together with people from other disciplines. In order to come up with a solution to a real problem, team collaboration is necessary and (3) The approach to problem solving is about practice, not about theory. It is necessary to fail early and fail often in the process of creating workable solutions.

The panelists consisted of students who were working with partners in Kenya on how mobile technology could be used to address various social issues. A multidisciplinary team of students work in close collaboration with partners in Kenya, and some of these ideas are now being tested on the ground.

The first project that was described was M-maji (mmaji.wordpress.com). Sangick Jeon described how water in Kibera is scarce, costly and contaminated. Their aim is to use the nearly ubiquitous mobile technology to improve access to water. Vendors are able to advertise their water and then buyers can ask questions and provide feedback. This saves the time and resources that it takes to find clean water.

Nishuari, the second project, addresses the problem of inaccurate advice and rumors which lead to risky sexual behavior and often HIV and AIDS. They provide a mobile counseling service whereby individuals can submit health questions and receive responses from trained counselors using text messages. This helps to break down logistical and social barriers.

The third, Makmende considered the issue of serious crime in Kibera. Their aim is to look at how individuals can get safely from Point A to Point B. They set up walking groups so that people would not have to walk alone. Over 90% of people had a mobile phone and this was seen to be an effective way of building timely communication, so that groups of people can coordinate to walk more safely to reach their destinations.

The final project was Take Taka, which was the one project that was not focused on using computer technology. The team took up sanitation as the project and decided early on that the use of mobile phones adds no value to the issue. The focused instead of designing a special sanitary bucket that could be used instead of a toilet inside the home, and on developing a system of transmitting the deposits to a biogas unit. This project however has not been carried forward.