4 elucidating differences across settings. In these countries, a total of 31,848 households were interviewed, with sample sizes per country varying between 2,716 (Uganda) and 12,271 households (Malawi), of which, on average, 76% were rural. Burkina Faso and Mali have joined the Initiative more recently and their survey findings are not included here.

The LSMS‐ISA initiative also presents a number of notable innovations on <mark>the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys, which for some time provided important information on the lives of Africans, their income, their economic activities, and their wellbeing. Most importantly, it strengthens the coverage of household agricultural activities—the Integrated‐Surveys‐on‐Agriculture part of LSMS‐ISA. The surveys are based on household samples and designed from the perspective of the household, not the farm. As a result, medium and large scale farms are only sparsely covered in practice (Jayne et al., 2016), even though technically represented in the sample. Information is gathered at both the household and the plot level, covering every aspect of farming life—from the plots they cultivate, the inputs they use, the crops they grow, the time they allocate per plot, the harvest that is achieved, the way they market it, the amount they lose post‐harvest, and so on.</mark> <mark>Second, in addition to the integrated approach to data collection, data gathering takes place at highly disaggregated levels, at the plot level, but also at the individual level, such as for time allocation and plot management. This enables a more refined, gendered perspective on agriculture and rural livelihoods. Third, the surveys make wide use of ICT‐tools. Tablets are used for data collection, improving the quality of data (Caeyers, Chalmers, and De Weerdt, 2012); households are geo‐referenced using Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, enabling further integration with other data sources, and plot size is measured by GPS as opposed to self‐reporting, improving the accuracy of land based statistics (Carletto, Gourlay and Winters, 2015). Finally, individuals (not just households) are tracked across survey waves, opening a host of new research areas such as the study of migration.</mark> <mark>These four innovative features of the data (integration, individualization, ICT use and intertemporal tracking) not only help obtain a more refined insight in African agriculture and its rural livelihoods, they also help scrutinize conventional views that have so far lacked an adequate information base to do so, such as the gender patterns in agricultural labor allocation or the application of joint input packages in practice, i.e. at the plot level. The nationally representative scope of the data and the great degree of standardization across countries in questionnaire design and survey implementation further facilitate cross‐country comparison as well as comparisons across settings within countries.</mark> <mark>Given the core objective of establishing solid statistics and distinguishing myths from facts, the studies have been primarily descriptive in orientation, focusing on a careful definition and empirical operationalization of the concepts at hand. Regression analysis is mainly used to complement the findings, to check robustness and generate hypotheses, not for causal inference. For this reason, the panel nature of the data has not been exploited much here, and the focus has been limited to the first rounds of the data. Cross‐country comparisons were systematically undertaken when data comparability permitted it to do so.</mark> <mark>The twelve topics examined were chosen following a review of key policy documents and expert consultations, and retained because of their salient nature in ongoing academic and policy debates, in addition to the feasibility of the new LSMS‐ISA data to address and advance these debates. The papers speak to the prevailing, overarching notions that 1) Africa’s agricultural technology is backward; 2) that smallholder engagement with input, factor and product markets remains limited and 3) that Africa and its citizens are behind in the structural transformation of their economies, occupations and incomes.</mark>