Unmasking Farm Typologies: the 'three Rural Worlds' and resource endowment distributions in eight countries of sub-Saharan Africa

We distill common resource endowment indicators from the N2Africa baseline data through Principal Component Analysis. These indicators are valid in each country. From these indicators we construct a resource endowment score for each household. We assess the distribution of resource endowment within each country, and across the different countries. We link the distributions to the three Rural Worlds and quantify how large each Rural World is. We argue that Rural World three, in which the poorest farmers are classified, is probably larger than currently assumed. The currently popular market-based agriultural development models are likely to bypass the large numbers of farmers from Rural World three.