Growth and Productivity in Agriculture
and Agribusiness : Evaluative Lessons from World Bank
Group Experience

The World Bank Group has a unique
opportunity to match the increases in financing for
agriculture with a sharper focus on improving agricultural
growth and productivity in agriculture-based economies,
notably in Sub-Saharan Africa. Greater effort will be needed
to connect sectoral interventions and achieve synergies from
public and private sector interventions; to build capacity
and knowledge exchange; to take stock of experience in
rain-fed agriculture; to ensure attention to financial
sustainability and to cross-cutting issues of gender,
environmental, and social impacts and climate; and to better
integrate the World Bank Group support at the global and
regional levels with that at the country level. This
evaluation uses the typology of economies developed by the
Agriculture for Development: World Development Report 2008
as one classification in its analysis. In the
agriculture-based category, which includes most of
Sub-Saharan Africa, development of the agriculture sector is
essential to growth and poverty reduction, yet productivity
is low, constrained by limited access to modern inputs,
irrigation, communication, and transport. The World Bank
Group support focused on alleviating these constraints is
important to help achieve poverty reduction.