ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the prevailing opportunities and challenges that confront rural Africa in the marketing sector, and how such issues are being addressed, with an emphasis towards the social development and anthropological literature. It focuses principally on marketing of farm produce from the rural smallholder sector (whether the produce is being marketed in rural or urban centres). The chapter is divided into two major sections, the first of which considers some of the broad major changes that have been occurring in patterns of rural marketing in sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade or so. The second focuses entirely on one topic of growing significance: the role of new technologies in the (re)shaping of market access and market practices – from mobile phones to Internet and web-enabled devices.
