Markets are both the rules and norms providing the legal and institutional context within which economic transactions take place, as well as the physical loci of such transactions. In considering the production environment, HarvestChoice focuses on the physical and spatial dimensions of markets in goods and services. Of particular focus is the likely extent to which farming households are physically integrated with or isolated from input and output markets and a range of service providers.
HarvestChoice uses a mix of third party and its own metrics of market access that reflect the distance, time or travel cost between farm households and market or service locations. We have generated maps and tables of the accessibility of rural populations across all lands and in rainfed cropland areas of Africa to market/service locations (considered here only as human settlements) of different size (populations of >20K, >50K, >100K, >250K, >500K).
We present above a range of maps of accessibility to market centers of varying sizes in Africa. Each of these maps, along with similar maps for rainfed cropland areas, can be downloaded individually below.
In sub-Saharan Africa on average, a city of greater than 50,000 will more than likely offer the markets and services sought by rural farm households as a means of trading or selling their own goods as well as buying food, clothing, etc… for their families. To gain a better understanding of the accessibility to these market centers, in addition to the map, we looked at the distribution of both land and rural populations among several accessibility classes by specific countries and regional groupings in Sub-Saharan Africa. The travel time to market centers is divided into four classes: High: 0-2 hours, Medium: 2-4 hours, Low: 4-8 hours & Remote: >8 hours.
Sub-Saharan Africa Land Area and Rural Population by Market Accessibility Class
Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-national Agroecological Zone and Market Access Reporting Tool
Similar but more detailed reports of these data for regional, national, and subnational levels as well as specific agroecological zones can be produced using the reporting tool below.
