Agricultural Market information systems: Key lessons learnt in Africa

Agricultural market information systems (MIS) were largely promoted in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to support the policies of liberalization of agricultural value chains in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These systems had the goal of facilitating agricultural marketing through reduced asymmetries between traders and rural farmers, collecting information for food security monitoring, and providing information to governments for better policy formulation. Today, there exist two main models of these systems: first generation and second generation models. This book gives the reader detailed information about these systems, evaluates their sustainability and efficiency in providing up-to-date information to farmers, traders and other stakeholders, and also provides key lessons learnt from MIS in the past.