Prosperity in Rural Africa? Insights into Wealth, Assets, and Poverty from Longitudinal Studies in Tanzania

How can we track change in poor rural areas where data are scarce? How do we know what general economic growth does to places which are considered rural backwaters? As poorer countries try to transform their economies, and as economies appear to be rebounding across Africa, what is that doing to the rural poor?

Prosperity in Rural Africa? provides surprising and challenging answers to these questions. It brings together the expertise of a collection of researchers with decades of experience of working in Tanzania, all of whom faced a deceptively simple task: go back to your study sites, to the places you know well, and to the families you first visited and then describe, and try to explain, the changes that you see. The result is a fascinating compilation of insights and experience into the dynamics of rural societies in Tanzania, which highlights the importance of investment in assets for rural peoples and their success in doing so, largely through their endeavours in small-holder farming. Assets are centrally important to local definitions of wealth across the country. This matters a great deal because rural people's investment in assets is not counted when poverty lines are calculated. There are sound methodological reasons for this omission. But it means that when rural people invest in assets, then that growing prosperity is invisible in development data. This book shows what those data can miss.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Dan Brockington, University of Sheffield,Christine Noe, University of Dar es Salaam

Dan Brockington directs the Sheffield Institute of International Development at the University of Sheffield. He studied for his thesis at UCL with Kathy Homewood and has worked on aspects of natural resource management and livelihood change in East Africa based on long term fieldwork in remote
locations. He has recently published (with Peter Billie Larson) The Anthropology of Conservation NGOs (Palgrave, 2018).

Christine Noe is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Dar es Salaam. She trained for her PhD at the University of Cape Town where she graduated in 2009. Her research and teaching are mostly on conservation and development politics, land tenure and rights, and rural livelihood
changes. She has held fellowships with the Five College Young African Scholars program (University of Massachusetts), All Africa House (University of Cape Town), and the Visiting African Fellowship (University of Cambridge). Christine believes that strong collaborations are the foundation on which
solid African scholarship can be supported.

1. Understanding Long Term Change in Rural Tanzania, Dan Brockington and Christine Noe
Part 1: The Role of Assets in Understanding Social Change in Rural Tanzania: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections
2. Assets, Prosperity and Data in Rural Africa, Dan Brockington and Christine Noe
3. The Multiple Meanings of Prosperity and Poverty in Tanzania, Olivia Howland, Christine Noe, and Dan Brockington
4. Assets and Domestic Units: Methodological Challenges for Longitudinal Studies of Poverty Dynamics., Dan Brockington, Ernestina Coast, Anna Mdee, Olivia Howland, and Sara Randall
Part 2: Case Studies of Change
5. Tracing the Relationships between Assets and Well-being in Complex Social Environments, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder
6. Modern Farming and the Transformation of Livelihoods in Rural Tanzania, Katherine A. Snyder, Emmanuel Sulle, Deodatus A. Massay, Anselmi Petro, Paschal Qamara, and Dan Brockington
7. Women's Tears or Coffee Blight: A Gender Dynamics and Livelihood Strategies in Contexts of Agricultural Transformation in Tanzania, Christine Noe, Olivia Howland, and Dan Brockington
8. The Sesame Seed Cash Injection: Commodity-fuelled Asset Booms in Remote Rural Tanzania, Dan Brockington
9. Self-made Farmers and Sustainable Changea Entrepreneurs and Development in Goima and Mirambu, William Östberg, Dan Brockington, and Joseph Mduma
10. Prosperity, Equality, and Power: Perspectives from Gitting and Gocho, Manyara Region, Vesa-Mati Loiske and Dan Brockington
11. Ricing Fortunes: Agricultural Growth, Farm Intensification, and Paddy Specialization in Two Tanzanian Villages, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, Ellen Hillbom, and Elibariki Msuya
12. Involution and Enterprise in Rural Areas. A Twenty-Year Perspective on Rural and Agricultural Change in Morogoro, Stefano Ponte and Dan Brockington
13. Rural and Agrarian Transformation 1984-2018 in Three Marginal Villages in Njombe Region, Tanzania, Esbern Friis-Hansen
14. Exploring Long Term Changes in People's Welfare on the Uporoto Highlands, Mbeya District, Tanzania, Cosmas Sokoni and Verdiana Tilumanywa
15. Improved Livelihoods on Less Land: The Case of Ilambilole and Ikuwala Villages in Iringa Region, 1996-2017, Torben Birch-Thomsen and Esbern Friis-Hansen
16. The Urbanising Frontier, Change, and Continuity: Uchira 1996-2018., Anna Mdee
Part 3: Conclusions
17. Telling the Stories of Asset Accumulation, Christine Noe and Dan Brockington
Epilogue: Doing Longitudinal Research, Christine Noe, Stefano Ponte, Dan Brockington, Anna Mdee, Cosmas Sokoni, Esbern Friis-Hansen, Verdiana Tilumanywa, Katherine Snyder, Emmanuel Sulle, Willie ?stberg, Vesa-Matti Loiske, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Agnes Andersson Djurfeldt, and Torben
Birch-Thomsen
Biographies of Principal Authors