Short Summary: Soil fertility is the number-one natural resource in Africa; yet during the last two decades its depletion on smallholder farms has led to stagnant or decreasing per capita food production. Unexamined, except in this special edition of the African Studies Quarterly, are the gender impacts of the soil fertility crisis in Africa. Papers in the special issue examine a variety of development interventions which have been used to reach women farmers to improve their soils and increase their yields. Such methods include fertilizer vouchers and grants, microcredit, small bags of fertilizer, agroforestry and legume innovations, and increased cash cropping by women. Results show to African policy makers which methods potentially work and have a greater ability to reach women farmers with different household compositions so that they can reverse the alarming trend toward declining per capita food production.

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