| dc.description.abstracteng | Agriculture is important for most of the world’s poor population not only as a source of income but defense against hunger. Over the last three decades, agricultural supply chain organizational structures in developing countries have increasingly become complex and transformed because of the emergence of competitive, fast-moving business environments. These changes have particularly affected several food value chains, creating in some cases positive effects, and resulting in the exclusion of smallholders who are unable to meet specific supply chain requirements. This counteracts the achievement of development goals by disrupting associated distributional effects to excluded smallholders in developing countries. Evidence suggests that affected smallholders respond by switching marketing channels and shifting to organizational network relationships. This consequently intensifies the formation of dualistic systems in which both modern and local value chains coexist. However, since the mid-1990s, the focus of development analysts and researchers has been on the expansion and inclusion of smallholders in modern value chains. This has resulted in total neglect of local value chains, which remain a significant source of income for many rural populations and ensure effective food delivery that meets culturally diverse needs in developing countries. Only recently has agribusinesses’ and development analysts’ attention been placed on local value chains yet, some key knowledge and research areas remain unaddressed.
Indeed, our understanding of how local value chains are organized and function within dualistic systems remains generally limited. In particular, little is known about the role of socially constructed concepts such as gender-relations and decision-making power in driving value additions. Understanding these fundamentals is important for the postulation of policies for agricultural and local value chain upgrading and equitable distribution of wealth. Besides, smallholders continuously face external and internal contingencies that affect their competitiveness along food systems. Theory posits that the effects of changing business environments on smallholder performance can be mitigated by fitting supply chain network that includes vertical, horizontal and lateral relationships. However, the associations between these constructs as postulated theoretically remain generally underexplored, especially for smallholders in African food sectors. Frameworks and empirical analyses that holistically and simultaneously analyze these associations are rare. Furthermore, over the last two decades, there has been increasing attention of donors, governments and researchers to strengthen collection actions through producer groups in developing countries. Producer groups are widely viewed as valuable institutional arrangements for smallholders to cope with/overcome market inefficiencies arising from changing business environments. However, little is known about the effect of membership in producer groups on smallholder performance in fishery subsectors. Overall, bridging these gaps is important to understand and posit practical implications on how to promote alternative development models and smallholders’ opportunities in dynamic food systems.
On this account, this dissertation fills these gaps by analyzing the links between organizational structures, gender roles, and performance of smallholders in African local value chains. The dissertation consists of three main papers that are based on two types of data from the Nigerian shrimp and prawn sector. First, qualitative data was obtained between December 2017 and January 2018 from 48 respondents in three States namely; Akwa-Ibom, Delta and Lagos. The second data includes two sets of quantitative data obtained from the survey of 405 producers and 238 processors in Akwa-Ibom, Ondo and Lagos States between May and August 2018.
The first paper aims to uncover how local value chains in dualistic food systems are organized, depicting the predominant governance themes, gender roles for value addition, and necessary upgrading strategies for smallholders in Africa. Failure of existing studies to capture the evolution and multiplicity of governance structures, and hidden social constructs has resulted in mixed findings on the organization and drivers of local value chains. Using qualitative data obtained from 3 in-depth focus group discussions and 21 key informant interviews, we rely on the global value chain approach to map local value chain’s organization distinctively from modern value chains. We make a conceptual contribution by extending this approach to include a gendered dimension of the value web approach, which we developed. This allows for simultaneous analysis of the roles of governance schemes and hidden gender relations in driving local value chains.
Our main results reveal that competitive traders, the mutual dependence between production and processing segments and strategic business activities of female processors were crucial for the chain’s functioning. Results from the Net-maps show that the predominant marketing channel is long: producer–women processors/marketer–trader–retailer–consumer, however, analysis of the governance dimensions shows the importance of the relational governance between producers and women processors that allows for better coordination of supply and marketing activities at the supply-base. Further analysis of the gendered value-web highlights the vital roles women play in ensuring value additions and smooth flow of products along the chain. Women processors act as financial buffers for producers, points of contact and precursors to all midstream value additions in the value web.
The second paper builds on the results and implications of the first paper. Here, we suggest a comprehensive quantitative research framework to determine the relationship between changing business contingencies, organizational supply chain networks and smallholder performance. While supply chain contingencies and organizational complexities have been widely studied in organizational theory literature, it only became a subject of quantitative analysis in recent times. Still, several conceptual and research shortcomings exist in the literature such as the neglect of the concurrent fit of organizational strategies to both external and internal contingencies, lack of comprehensive analysis of organizational networks, and less focus on multiple tiers. Hence, we use a variance-based structural equation model to analyze the quantitative data from producers and women processors. We first take a cue from contingent resource-based theory and netchain approach to conceptualize the influence of both external (market turbulence, technological progress, distrust and power asymmetry) and internal (human and financial resources) contingencies on organizational relationships and performance, extending an existing empirical model. We then empirically test the so-called “Contingency-Netchain-Performance” (CNP) framework, on two tiers to derive valid and comprehensive evidence comparable across the tiers.
Results from the estimations indicate that both external and internal contingencies significantly influence adaptational change in organization supply chain network, which in turn contributes to smallholders’ performance. All the smallholders’ external contingencies influence the formation of tighter vertical coordination but their influences differ on horizontal and lateral relationships. More importantly, results reveal that smallholders’ internal contingencies concurrently influence their organizational network structures and performance. However, the influence of both external and internal contingencies on organizational networks seems to differ across tiers while supply chain vertical relationships tend to intensify the formation of closer network structures. Several conceptual, theoretical and practical contributions emerged from the successful application of the CNP framework in this study.
In the third paper, we examined the selectivity-corrected role of fisher groups on the capture and technical efficiency of artisanal shrimpers in Africa. We empirically identify factors that influence shrimpers’ decision to belong to fisher groups and estimate the effect of membership on capture and technical efficiency. Methodological augmentation using Greene’s stochastic production frontier method and propensity score matching that correct for selection bias, allows us to account for different technological set if any, and sample selection bias from both observed and unobserved factors. We use quantitative data of 353 producers that operate outboard engines, comprising of 95 members and 258 non-members. We found that the overall participation in fisher groups is positively determined by shrimpers’ socioeconomic characteristics; female participation in shrimp-related groups; and infrastructural facilities like credit and tarmacked roads. The stochastic results reveal that technical efficiency scores remain consistently higher for members regardless of how biases were corrected. Although technical efficiency scores for members and nonmembers tend to be over-estimated if selectivity is not appropriately controlled, our findings suggest that participation in fisher groups is important for smallholders with below-average performance and positively related to increases in catch and technical efficiency.
Important lessons and conclusions were derived from the results of this dissertation. The papers confirm that organizational network structures matter for smallholders’ upgrading and local value chain development in Nigeria. Our results confirm strong influences from highly dynamic external and internal contingencies on the formation of dense and complex organizational network structures in which vertical and network relationships are dependent. By aligning their organizational network structure to fit changing external and internal contingencies, smallholders can create and remain competitive within dualistic sectors. However, associated concepts such as gender roles and internal contingencies across mutually dependent tiers are important to upgrade smallholders’ activities. Furthermore, fisher groups is a valuable institutional arrangement as they tend to improve shrimpers’ capture and technical efficiency, and might be crucial for attaining equitable distributional effects to smallholders with below-average economic performances. Relevant policy implications for smallholders’ upgrading and local value chain development, as well as limitations of the study, are discussed in the papers. | de |