Policy highlights:

• Since agriculture and social protection are fundamentally linked in rural African livelihoods, stronger coherence between interventions that target agriculture or social protection can help to improve the welfare of poor small family farmers.
• Such coherence can be strengthened by intervening in the enabling environment. Aspects that can contribute include political commitment and architecture to ensure a coherent political agenda, coherent institutional and financing arrangements, and the promotion of human capacities.
• In addition to intervening in the enabling environment, policymakers should adopt a number of practical approaches to systematically pursue coherence: 1) adapt single interventions to ensure they contribute to agricultural as well as social protection goals; 2) combine agricultural and social protection interventions in a single programme so that targeted households participate in both; and 3) coordinate multiple programmes and policies to prevent negative policy impacts.