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This paper examines the intersections between youth access to land, migration decisions and employment opportunities using nationally representative and multi-year data from multiple African countries. We document evidence on the evolving dynamics in land distribution and ownership patterns, the effect of land access on youth livelihood choices and development of rental and sales market in the region. The report highlights six key findings: First, a progressively smaller proportion of young people are inheriting land due to land scarcity. Second, rural youth who do inherit land will need to wait longer to gain access to it because of significantly longer adult life spans. Third, land scarcity has been driving rapid changes in the land ownership and distribution patterns over the past decade and shaping the employment and migration decisions of rural youth. Fourth, the share of individual labour time devoted to farming is declining over time across age categories and gender, signifying that continued economic transformation processes are underway in Africa.

Efforts aimed at addressing low productivity of maize in Nigeria and most parts of SSA via improved soil fertility management have largely been based on the conventional blanket extension recommendations rather than site-specific recommendations which take into consideration the heterogeneity in farmers growing conditions. To contribute in addressing this challenge, a computer-based tool known as Nutrient Expert (NE) for maize is been developed. In anticipation of the introduction of the tool, we use discrete choice experiment to evaluate maize farmers preferences for site-specific extension recommendations at the development phase of the tool where farmers preferences can improve the tool development. We find that farmers have strong preference for site-specific extension recommendations on nutrient management over the traditional blanket recommendations. However, there is heterogeneity of preferences giving rise to two segments of farmers (innovators and conservatives) defined largely by differences in resource endowment. Our empirical findings have implications for improvement, potential uptake and targeting of the tool to meet the needs of different categories of farmers. Acknowledgement : We deeply appreciate the support of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) for funding Taking Maize Agronomy to Scale (TAMASA) project and the PhD research activities that produced this paper.

While the bulk of migration literature in Africa has focused on the movement of people from rural to urban areas, much less is known about rural mobility, including its magnitude, drivers, and implications for agricultural development. Using nationally representative survey data for Zambia, we document very high levels of rural mobility throughout the country, and show that this movement is correlated with both land and labor market conditions. About 20% of rural households on average have moved from elsewhere, with highest in-migration rates (~30%) in more accessible, higher density areas, reflecting the importance of wage-employment and services as pull factors. We find that rural in-migrants in relatively accessible areas are wealthier than in-migrants in less accessible areas, although in-migrants are wealthier than non-migrants in all areas. Furthermore, rural in-migrants exhibit greater use of inputs, agricultural productivity, land use intensity and market integration than their non-migrant neighbors. Impacts of in-migration on receiving communities appear to be virtuous: in addition to descriptive indicators that indicate cash injections into local economies (e.g. via greater propensity to hire in labor and services), we find econometric evidence of positive spillover effects of neighborhood in-migration rates on farm-level land productivity outcomes. Acknowledgement : This work was funded by a grant from the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), which is led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and funded by CGIAR Fund Donors.