Three Essays on African Agriculture: Land Rights, Extension, and Market Participation in Uganda

Over 80% of the Ugandan workforce is involved in the agricultural sector. With so many livelihoods connected to agriculture, increases in productivity and efficiency have significant impacts on household welfare. This study examines three important aspects of the Ugandan agricultural economy: land rights, market participation, and agricultural extension. We first examine the impact of land sovereignty on household tree-planting behavior in Uganda. Four classes of land tenure exist in Uganda and result in significantly different levels of tenant rights. We use panel data and random effects models to investigate the impact of tenant restrictions on the decision to plant trees and the number of trees planted. We find the presence of restrictions can significantly impact the household's decision to plant trees for mailo and customary tenants. Restrictions influence the number of trees planted for mailo tenants, but have no effect on customary tenants.;Market participation potentially offers many benefits to farm households, but high transactions costs prevent many agricultural households from participating. Mobile phones have become powerful tools for economic development in Africa and have the potential to impact transactions costs faced by market participants. The impact of mobile phone use is complicated by potential endogeneity. We use instrumental variables and random effects models to test and control for endogeneity between mobile phones and market participation. We investigate the impact of mobile phones on household market participation and intensity of participation in bean, maize, and banana markets in Uganda. We find evidence that household mobile phone ownership positively impacts the decision to participate in markets, but does not influence household decisions about quantity marketed. We find the percentage of mobile phone owners in a village does not impact market decisions or affect the impact of personal mobile phone ownership on market decisions.;Extension services provide channels through which farmers are exposed to new information and agricultural practices that can increase their productivity. Because of differences in program design and resource availability, extension effectiveness has varied greatly across Africa. We investigate the impact of membership in a National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAADS) farmer group on farm yields in Uganda. We also investigate the household and farm characteristics that influence the effectiveness of NAADS farmer groups. We find farmer group membership has no impact on farm yields. Our investigation of factors influencing farmer group effectiveness reveals certain groups of farmers are not benefitting more than other groups. In particular, characteristics such as gender, wealth, age, and land ownership do not influence the effectiveness of farmer group membership.