Abstract            Volume:14  Issue-9  Year-2026         Original Research Articles

Online ISSN : 2347 - 3215 Issues : 12 per year Publisher : Excellent Publishers Email : editorijcret@gmail.com

Background: Cashew is strategically important to agricultural exports and rural livelihoods in Benin and across Africa, yet producers face information asymmetries, price volatility, high transaction costs, limited storage and finance, and unequal bargaining power. Governments and producer organizations have introduced marketing-season rules, reference prices, quality standards, buyer licensing, trade measures, processing incentives, and organizational reforms. This review examines how these institutional arrangements influence market competition, market performance, producer welfare, and resilience. We conducted a systematic scoping review reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020 and synthesized evidence using the Synthesis Without Meta-analysis guideline. Bilingual searches covered bibliographic databases, scholarly search engines, and institutional repositories for January 2000 to 6 September 2026, with earlier foundational studies retained when theoretically necessary. Eligibility followed a SPIDER/PICo framework. The reported screening process identified 426 records, retained 318 after deduplication, assessed 74 full texts, and included 36 studies and analytical reports. Evidence was appraised with design-appropriate criteria, including MMAT principles, and coded by institutional mechanism, market outcome, welfare outcome, setting, and risk of bias. Seven included documents focused directly on Benin. This deliberately narrow national subset reflects strict eligibility requirements—an explicit institutional or marketing mechanism, extractable producer-level market or welfare outcomes, and transparent methods—rather than an absence of Beninese cashew literature. The wider African evidence base was retained for mechanism-based transferability and is reflected in the revised geographic scope of the title. Across settings, information transparency and credible collective action can reduce search and transaction costs; however, realized gains depend on producers’ ability to switch buyers, negotiate, store output, access finance, and demonstrate quality. Price and trade measures redistribute value across actors and may create unintended effects where enforcement is uneven. Evidence on contracts and cooperatives generally suggests welfare gains, but estimates remain vulnerable to selection bias, contextual heterogeneity, and local market power. Resilience emerges as a distinct welfare dimension linking institutional support to households’ ability to maintain consumption, mobilize savings, diversify income, and avoid harmful coping strategies after climatic, health, or market shocks. Institutional reforms improve producer welfare only when they are credible, locally implemented, and accompanied by effective market options. Future empirical work in Benin should distinguish reform awareness, exposure, implementation intensity, and compliance; measure net prices and buyer concentration; and assess income, food security, assets, satisfaction, and resilience. Causal claims require explicit identification assumptions and sensitivity analyses.

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