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Substance abuse is a major public concern for the entire world. Using data from the National Income Dynamic Study wave four, this study examines the impact of substance (alcohol and tobacco) consumption on labour market outcomes in South Africa using the multinomial endogenous switching regression technique. This method controls for any potential selection bias and endogeneity problems. The results from the study reveal that individuals’ decisions to consume alcohol only, tobacco only, and a combination of both are driven by socioeconomic, health, and demographic factors. The estimated causal effect shows that substance use reduces individuals’ earnings in almost all cases and increases working hours. The findings suggest that efforts to control the use of alcohol and tobacco in South Africa should focus more on sensitization programmes that address the health, psychological, and economic implications of using these substances.

Many empirical studies have documented the role of farm management practices such as irrigation in reducing poverty and improving household well-being. Few studies, however, have looked at the impact of irrigation farming on poverty vulnerability and the welfare of rural farming household. This study examined the factors that influence farmers’ participation in irrigation farming, as well as how it affects farmers' food consumption expenditure per capita (proxy for welfare), poverty gap index, poverty severity and poverty vulnerability. The study's data was collected from farming households in the northern and coastal parts of the Eastern province of South Africa. The endogenous switching regression (ESR) model was employed in the study to account for selection bias that could be caused by both observed and unobserved household factors. The empirical result shows that gender, household size, educational attainment, crop diversification, and market outlet among others influenced farmers' decision to practice irrigation farming. Farmers engaging in irrigation farming boosted their food consumption per capita by 44%, while non-participants would have increased their consumption expenditure per capita by 23% if they had participated. Moreover, participating farmers reduced their poverty gap index by 20% and poverty severity by 22%, whereas non-participating farmers could have reduced their poverty gap index and poverty severity by 5% and 17%, respectively had they engaged in irrigation farming. Participation in irrigation farming also reduced poverty vulnerability by 25%, while non-participants may have reduced poverty vulnerability by 3%. The findings suggest that enhancing farmers' access to irrigation is crucial to meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to eradicate poverty in all its manifestations everywhere.

The expansion of Ghana’s cashew industry is expected to be a watershed moment in the country’s diversification of agricultural export commodity trade. In Ghana’s cashew farms, however, there is a significant difference between observed and potential farm yield. As a result, empirical study is required to serve as policy guidelines in order to improve farmer’s productive efficiency and, as a necessary consequence, contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of no poverty and zero hunger. The study explores farm-level productive efficiency and factors that can lead to variations in farmer’s technical efficiency in the Bono East region of Ghana. The single-stage double bootstrap Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) was used to estimate technical efficiency and its determinants. The estimated results indicate that the average bias-corrected technical efficiency score (33%) was lower than the original average score (51%), suggesting that the original efficiency scores had been skewed upwards. Some of the primary factors that have been reported as having a significant effect on technical efficiency include the gender of respondents, educational attainment, and membership of farmer groups. Results of the resource-use efficiency analysis suggest that cashew farmers in Ghana do not escape the criticisms of inefficient resource allocation. Farm-level policies should be skewed towards enhancing resource-use efficiency through effective capacity-building to improve farmer’s management and technical capabilities, improve farm productivity, and consequently contribute to Ghana's quest to meet the sustainable development goals.

Although women are actively involved in a wide array of agricultural production activities, they have limited access to farm productive resources and their influence in decision-making is also restricted compared with men. These limitations have the potential to affect women performance in agriculture. This study assesses gender-based farm performance (proxy by productivity) differences and identified sources of performance differentials amongst rice farmers in rural Nigeria using the Blinder-Oaxaca gender decomposition framework. The results revealed a disparity between men and women with a gender performance gap of about 11% in favour of men, of which 77.66% of the gap remained unexplained after accounting for gender differences in household characteristics, access to supply-driven factors, and farm productive resources. A more detailed analysis suggests that factors such as the use of improved rice varieties, membership of farmer-based organisations, extension services, and quantity of seeds sown could contribute to the gender performance gap. As a result, the study concludes that focusing on these productivity gaps and the factors that contribute to them is critical for developing policy interventions aimed at empowering women.

For most developing countries like Ghana, the adoption of productive agricultural technologies in the quest to achieve food security and improve farmers' welfare cannot be overemphasized. Hence, interventions that have the potential to enhance the impact of the adoption of these technologies are critical for development planning and policy. This study investigates whether or not village saving groups enhance the welfare impact of agricultural technology adoption using farm-level data collected from the Garu and Tempane districts in the Upper East Region, Ghana. We applied an instrumental variable regression model that incorporates an endogenous interaction term to estimate the interceding role of village saving groups on the welfare impact of agricultural technology adoption. The empirical results reveal that participation in village savings groups further enhances the welfare impact of agricultural technology adoption (proxy by Zai technology). The factors that influence farmer's participation in village saving groups include the number of extension contacts, membership of farmer-based organizations (FBOs) and access to farm credit. Other factors such as the age of the farmer, household size and years of education were also found to influence farmers' decisions to adopt Zai technology. The study recommends the promotion of village saving groups as they build rural farmers' capacity to save for farm investment, which further enhances their adoption of agrarian technology in the quest to improve farmers' welfare. Moreover, policy instruments like the revitalization of extension services, the formation of FBOs, and access to farm credits should be strengthened in this pursuit.