THE RISE OF KENYAN SUPERMARKETS AND THE EVOLUTION OF THEIR FRESH FRUITS AND VEGETABLES PROCUREMENT SYSTEMS

Supermarkets are rapidly penetrating urban food retail in Kenya and spreading well beyond their initial tiny market niche into the food markets of lower-income groups. Having penetrated processed and staple food markets much earlier and faster than fresh foods, they have recently begun to make inroads into the fresh fruits and vegetables category. The important changes in their procurement systems bring significant opportunities and challenges for small farmers, and have implications for agricultural diversification and rural development programmes and policies.Marketing,

SUPERMARKETS AND CONSUMERS IN AFRICA: THE CASE OF NAIROBI, KENYA

Supermarkets are rapidly penetrating urban food retail in Kenya and spreading well beyond their initial tiny market niche into the food markets of lower-income groups. Having penetrated processed and staple food markets much earlier and faster than fresh foods, they have recently begun to make inroads into the fresh fruits and vegetables category. The important changes in their procurement systems bring significant opportunities and challenges for small farmers, and have implications for agricultural diversification and rural development programmes and policies.Consumer/Household Economics, Marketing,

FARM-LEVEL PERSPECTIVES ON THE IMPACT OF DOMESTIC SUPERMARKETS ON KENYA'S FRESH FRUITS AND VEGETABLES SUPPLY SYSTEM

The rise of supermarkets in Kenya has given rise to a new group of medium-sized farms managed by well-educated farmers. Focusing on kale, the essay shows that nearly all supermarket-channel farmers have the capacity to supply larger volumes year round and have transportation vehicles, an irrigation system, a packing shed, a cellular phone, and so on, pointing to the existence of a threshold capital vector which farmers must have in order to access supermarkets. Especially farm size and irrigation were found to be significant determinants of participation in the supermarket channel. Kale suppliers to supermarkets use more capital intensive production technologies, leading to average labor and land productivities which are 60-70% higher than in the traditional channel. Eighty percent of labor consists of hired workers, indicating that these farmers could be important in alleviating poverty for rural households with little or no land. While most traditional-channel kale farmers sell to brokers and get a price that lets them break-even at best, supermarket-channel farmers have a 40% gross profit margin. These margins and lower market risks in the supermarket channel have resulted in a strong growth dynamic of supermarket-channel farmers which have doubled the size of their operations over the last five years.Marketing,

32. Common Spelling Problems

For some writers, their main spelling problem is similar-sounding words, for example, principle and principal or affect and effect. These problems cannot be flagged by software spell-checking functions. Here is a list of these commonly confused homophones (different spelling; same or very similar pronunciation), with examples of their correct use. All definitions in this section are from the Merriam Webster dictionary via the Merriam Webster Dictionary mobile application

05.09: Common Spelling Problems

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to: Identify and correctly spell commonly misspelled words. Define and distinguish between similar-sounding words

Incentives for Fertilizer Use in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of Empirical Evidence on Fertilizer Response and Profitability

This research addresses two questions: Why is fertilizer not yet fulfilling its potential as a major stimulus to agricultural productivity in SSA? What can be done to improve the situation? Our answers are based on an extensive review of fertilizer response, profitability, and policy literature as well as some analysis of crop budgets and aggregate national statistics on fertilizer consumption. Much of the debate about fertilizer use in SSA focuses on two issues: whether the profit incentive is adequate and, if so, whether farmers have the capacity to access and use it.food security, food policy, fertilizer use, sub-Saharan Africa, Crop Production/Industries, Downloads May 2008-July 2009: 153, Q18,

DETERMINANTS OF FERTILIZER ADOPTION BY AFRICAN FARMERS: POLICY ANALYSIS FRAMEWORK, ILLUSTRATIVE EVIDENCE, AND IMPLICATIONS

Crop Production/Industries,

The Feasibility of Dynamically Granted Permissions: Aligning Mobile Privacy with User Preferences

Current smartphone operating systems regulate application permissions by prompting users on an ask-on-first-use basis. Prior research has shown that this method is ineffective because it fails to account for context: the circumstances under which an application first requests access to data may be vastly different than the circumstances under which it subsequently requests access. We performed a longitudinal 131-person field study to analyze the contextuality behind user privacy decisions to regulate access to sensitive resources. We built a classifier to make privacy decisions on the user's behalf by detecting when context has changed and, when necessary, inferring privacy preferences based on the user's past decisions and behavior. Our goal is to automatically grant appropriate resource requests without further user intervention, deny inappropriate requests, and only prompt the user when the system is uncertain of the user's preferences. We show that our approach can accurately predict users' privacy decisions 96.8% of the time, which is a four-fold reduction in error rate compared to current systems.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure