Agripreneurship will not save rural livelihoods on its own: Why the field needs an integrated model, not another case study

Abstract

Agripreneurship has become one of the most fashionable prescriptions in rural development policy, offered as the route from subsistence farming to diversified, resilient livelihoods. This viewpoint argues that the research base underneath the prescription is not yet strong enough to bear the policy weight placed on it. Studies of entrepreneurial behaviour, farmer producer organizations, credit constraints, market linkage, digital platforms, gender, social capital and ecological outcomes each proceed largely in isolation, disciplinary silo by disciplinary silo, with almost no attempt to show how these pieces fit together into a single mechanism. The result is a literature rich in case evidence but poor in explanatory architecture: it can tell us that producer organizations help, that credit constraints bind, and that digital tools bypass the poorest smallholders, but not how these forces combine to convert household assets into community-level development. This piece sets out that gap plainly, proposes an integrated model, AGRI-SPIRE, as a corrective, and argues that global, national and local policymakers are currently designing interventions on the strength of fragments rather than a coherent theory of change.