Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of last-mile market access costs for smallholder farmers in Africa

While a rich theoretical and empirical literature on economic remoteness has developed in recent years, there is not much recent empirical evidence on the costs faced by farmers in moving inputs and outputs from the farm gate to the nearest market. We propose innovative qualitative and quantitative data collection on last-mile transfer costs in Tanzania (and possibly other countries) to describe these costs, and the barriers they may constitute for market participation by risk-averse smallholder farmers.