Study title

Numerous African economies are growing rapidly and there are signs of prosperity in rural and urban regions. The greater returns the wealthy enjoy enable them to concentrate land and resources. Those without land become a rural proletariat, their livelihoods part of the general trend towards deagrarianisation, but in the absence of viable alternatives to agriculture they are not characterized by prosperity and long term prospects. We revisited families in Tanzania who had been previously surveyed and explored changes to the assets they owned with a short questionnaire. These data contain the results of those revisits.Numerous African economies are growing rapidly and there are signs of prosperity in rural and urban regions. Cheaper technology (mobile phones, motorbikes and improved seed varieties) are reaching all but the remotest parts of many countries. However it is not always clear how inclusive and pro-poor this growth is. It is all too easy for the benefits of improved agricultural production, for example, to be concentrated on relatively few wealthy farmers and even to be instrumental in creating rural deprivation and landlessness. The greater returns the wealthy enjoy enable them to concentrate land and resources. Those without land become a rural proletariat, their livelihoods part of the general trend towards deagrarianisation, but in the absence of viable alternatives to agriculture they are not characterized by prosperity and long term prospects. In this context the key issue is what assets the rural poor can build up during periods of national economic growth. Growth which is accompanied by loss of assets (loss of farmland or livestock), or a failure to accrue new assets (such as help children earn educational qualifications) among the poor, either across households, or within households (according to their gender dynamics) will not be inclusive. Panel data-sets can provide some insights into these dynamics. However these are few, they can suffer...