One disadvantage of our data is that the samples are household-based rather than area-based and in some cases limited to rural areas. Land held by legal entities or corporations, or by urban dwellers in cases of rural samples, will thus not be captured. This may affect estimates of the farm size distribution in relatively land-abundant countries where these groups can account for sizeable land holdings. For example in Zambia, farms operating between 5 and 100 ha of land, most of them owned by urban dwellers or companies, control more land than the country’s entire smallholder sector (Sitko and Jayne 2014). Unfortunately, for all countries except Ethiopia, lack of data on land owned or operated by large farms makes it impossible to assess the extent of area not covered by our surveys. In this case, the country’s regular commercial farm survey puts the total area held by operational commercial farms at 1.55 million hectares (Ali _et al._ 2015), compared to 9.2 million hectares cultivated by smallholders, implying that our data would account for some 85% of the agriculturally held area in the country.<sup>5</sup>

# **3.2 Descriptive evidence on country contexts**

In addition to highlighting that smallholders’ livelihood strategies are diverse and evolving as described elsewhere (Davis _et al._ 2014), descriptive statistics for the surveys in our sample provide a number of insights (table 1). They suggest that (i) sizes of land used for crop cultivation remain small, with a land distribution that is skewed to the right in virtually all of the countries, (ii) gendered patterns of land access are diverse; and (iii) the level of land market activity varies across countries, partly in response to land scarcity, and land sales are much less frequent than land rentals.

The surveys reveal marked differences in the shares of illiterate heads (from 66% in Ethiopia to 16% in Uganda), and mean household income (from USD 664 in Malawi to USD 1,396 in Niger). Although they are engaged in agriculture, the majority of households complement income from agriculture with resources from other areas. In fact, except for Nigeria where 70% of household income is from crops, the mean contribution of crops and income from crop production is less than 50%, with agricultural wages (from 1% in Nigeria to 15% in Malawi), selfemployment (from 6% in Malawi to 24% in Niger), and transfers (from 1% in Nigeria to 8% in Malawi) making up the rest.

While the countries in our sample differ widely from each other in terms of relative land scarcity (Jayne _et al._ 2010), operated area per adult in smallholder farming is often limited by technology (Binswanger 1986) and thus less variable across countries. Indeed, for all of the countries except Niger, operated area per adult is less than one ha. With 3.02 plots per household, the level of fragmentation is highest in Ethiopia and lowest in Malawi with 1.74 with a large part of those with little or no land engaging in wage labor.

> 5 In Tanzania, the total area cultivated by smallholders, using the weights from our survey, amounts to 6.026 million hectares, compared to 9.2 million hectares that are cultivated according to FAO statistics (Deininger and Byerlee 2011).

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