# 1) Background and Summary

The agricultural sector concentrates large fractions of the labor force and economic output in many lowincome countries. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, the agricultural sector accounts for about 50% of the labor force (World Bank, 2021). The agricultural sector, and consequently domestic food production, is dominated by smallholder farmers in the region. Many of the world’s extreme poor rely on the agricultural sector for their income and food security. The importance of the agricultural sector for poverty alleviation, food security, structural transformation, and economic development more broadly has been widely recognized (Dercon and Gollin, 2014; Gollin, 2010). As a result, studying the sector has been of considerable interest to development research, policy interventions, and investment decisions (Adamopoulos and Restuccia, 2020; Gollin et al., 2014, 2013; Gollin and Udry, 2021; Restuccia and Rogerson, 2013).

However, the data landscape was long characterized by a persistent lack of high-quality data, requisite to informing research and policy interventions (Carletto, 2021). The World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) program was designed to address this gap. The LSMS-ISA program consists of nationally and sub-nationally representative, longitudinal and multi-topic household surveys, with a distinct focus on agricultural production. Starting in 2008, the surveys were implemented by National Statistical Offices (NSOs) with the support of the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) team. LSMS-ISA data is widely considered the premier source of survey micro-data on agricultural production and productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa – and its relationship to livelihoods, household income, poverty, and food security (Wollburg et al., 2024a, 2024b).

In this paper, we present a harmonized panel of LSMS-ISA surveys from seven Sub-Saharan African countries, namely Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. This harmonized panel dataset (hereafter HP) covers over 200,000 agricultural plot observations, over 400,000 individuals and 58,000 households, over the time period of 2008 to 2021. The data are nationally representative of these countries, which comprise 39% of the population and close to a third of the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa (Azevedo, 2011; World Bank, 2022). The data are also representative of the household and smallholder agriculture sector of the study countries. The longitudinal nature of the data allows tracking households, farms, and individuals across time. The HP provides longitudinal records for close to 58,000 agricultural and non-agricultural households and just over 400,000 individuals, allowing researchers to analyze patterns, dynamics, and trajectories over time.

The HP datasets are compiled from the public data releases of the LSMS-ISA surveys, which can be downloaded from the World Bank’s Microdata Library (see Table 1). The HP consists of four datasets, one containing records of households, one of individuals, one of agricultural plots, and one of crops on each plot. The preparation of the HP consisted of constructing, cleaning, and harmonizing close to 150 agricultural, household, and individual indicators with the objective of creating a data asset that is ready for analysis. The datasets are fully mergeable with publicly available raw LSMS-ISA datasets such that users can add additional variables from the LSMS-ISA surveys, and tailor the dataset to according to their research needs. Household, community, and farm locations are georeferenced, so that the datasets can be enriched with geospatial information. The HP datasets allow for highly disaggregated analyses at the 2