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International Women’s Day Interview with Jemimah Njuki
The first feature in IFPRI’s new video series, “On the Table,” provides an insightful interview with our Director for Africa, Jemimah Njuki. Njuki has long been a leader in gender equality and women’s empowerment in Africa’s agriculture sectors, and this year was named a UN Food Systems Summit Champion and leader of the summit’s women’s empowerment lever of change. She shares how a gender lens has been integrated into the upcoming 2021 UN Food Systems Summit from the beginning, and the importance of ensuring that gender equality and women’s voices are central to systems transformation. ( Check Out the Video)
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Steps to Sustainability: A new IFPRI policy brief by Valeria Piñeiro and colleagues provides guidance for policymakers on how best to promote the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices to farmers. The authors base their recommendations around the incentives-adoption-outcome chain: How well different incentives promote adoption, whether adoption leads to meaningful and measurable changes in outcomes, and what factors shape these links. (Read Brief)
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Signs of Resilience: Kalle Hirvonen, Alan de Brauw, and Gashaw Abate find food consumption and household dietary diversity was almost unchanged from September 2019 to August 2020 in Addis Ababa despite the pandemic, implying that food value chains have been more resilient to this shock than some might have expected. (Read Article)
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Is Solar the Solution?: Expanding irrigated agriculture could improve sub-Saharan Africa’s food security, but groundwater-fed irrigation requires energy. Hua Xie, Claudia Ringler, and Alam Hossain Mondal compared the cost-effectiveness of solar and diesel energy solutions in a range of crop and irrigation scenarios, providing useful insights into the prospects of promoting solar irrigation in the region. (Read Article)
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Push and Pull: By analyzing night light intensities and survey data, Mulubrhan Amare, Kibrom Abay, Channing Arndt, and Bekele Shiferaw examine migration patterns, finding, for example, that urban growth encourages migration among young people in Nigeria. They conclude that rural policy makers in sub-Saharan Africa need more tailored interventions to address the varying factors that drive rural to urban youth migration. (Read Article)
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Factors in Food Security: Using data from 250 smallholder maize farming households in rural Nigeria, Adebayo Ogunniyi and colleagues investigated the socio-economic drivers of food security. The evidence shines a light on where government efforts should focus in order to reduce food insecurity for these farming households. (Read Article)
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Ripple Effect: Research by IFPRI’s Jessica Leight and colleagues finds that the effects of a gender-transformative intervention to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) and HIV transmission in rural Ethiopia spilled over into the broader community, reducing reported IPV even among people who were not directly involved in the program. (Read Article)
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Yemen Hit Hard by Loss of Remittances Due to COVID-19
The pandemic has caused an unprecedented decline in the flow of remittances to Yemen. The latest blog in our COVID-19 series, by Dalia Elsabbagh, Sikandra Kurdi, and Manfred Wiebelt, discusses results from a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) multiplier model showing how the plunge in remittances following COVID-19 shutdowns and social distancing measures has starkly reduced household income and driven job losses in Yemen, compounding hardships during an already incredibly trying time of conflict and crisis. ( Read Blog)
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A Bold Agenda: The 2021 Summit of the Americas comes at a precarious time, with much of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) experiencing a severe economic and social crisis. Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla sees the summit as a unique opportunity for countries to align their visions towards revitalizing LAC and supporting its vital contributions to the global economy and planetary health. (Read Blog)
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Closing the Data Gap: Research on the links between agriculture, nutrition, and health has been hindered by a lack of data. Zhe Guo, Wahid Quabili, Liangzhi You, and Derek Headey showcase a new dataset from the ARENA Project that is closing that gap by combining Demographic and Health Survey data with GIS data. (Read Blog)
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Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands: The poor delivery of public services is a problem in many countries. In Uganda, community-based monitoring meetings called “barazas”—where citizens call officials out on these issues—have been found to increase the quality and quantity of some public services. Bjorn Van Campenhout and Caroline Miehe report on the effectiveness of this bottom-up monitoring. (Read Blog)
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A Score for Development: Sport is often used as a vehicle to promote development outcomes, as it is thought that improved psychosocial or socio-emotional behaviors can increase “readiness” for productive labor force participation. A “Sport for Change” youth program in Liberia did improve labor force outcomes, especially for more marginalized groups, but psychosocial improvements didn’t seem to be the mechanism behind this change, explain Lori Beaman, Sylvan Herskowitz, Niall Keleher, and Jeremy Magruder. (Read Blog)
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Waves of Migration: Bangladesh’s coastal zones are among the world’s most vulnerable to climate-driven sea rise. Contrary to conventional wisdom on sea level rise and migration, however, projections from Valerie Mueller and Andrew Reid Bell suggest that more people may move into, rather than out of, Bangladesh’s coastal zones by 2100 due the many non-agricultural income opportunities they offer. (Read Blog)
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Happy Birthday CGIAR: 50 Innovations in 2021!
We continue to highlight CGIAR’s 50 years of innovations that changed the world, with a focus on gender equality, youth, and social inclusion this month. IFPRI’s second featured innovation is our Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index! Since women have historically been undercounted in agricultural statistics, IFPRI and USAID set out to develop a tool that can give the full picture of agricultural inclusion. The WEAI was created and it now monitors women’s empowerment and parity at the household level in 56 countries worldwide!
We are also launching a distance learning course for pro-WEAI, which is designed to meet the needs of a range of users (e.g. quantitative analysts, monitoring & evaluation specialists, donors, field supervisors) by teaching specific skills related to the tool.
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AIDA Tool Launch: IFPRI Egypt recently launched its Agricultural Investment Data Analyzer (AIDA) tool for guiding agricultural investments. AIDA is innovative and easy to use, and it’s the first tool to allow you to use a “model without a model” — users design a package of investments and AIDA reports how the choices may affect a country’s economy and population. AIDA is currently available for a set of four countries: Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen. (Check out the tool, launch event, and more)
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 We have seen increasing use of the term ‘Building Back Better,’ but a failure to identify clear roadmaps of how to do so…” – Christophe Béné, Principal Scientist, Sustainable Food Systems, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. (Event)
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Our problem with obesity [in the US]…isn’t food deserts, it’s food swamps” – Robert Paarlberg, Adjunct professor of public policy, Harvard Kennedy School; & Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. (Event)
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The key issue for us is not one of ownership of machinery, but one of efficient, and affordable, and effective mechanization services” – Geoffrey C. Mrema, Professor, Department of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Sokoine University of Agriculture. (Event)
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“Myanmar needs a new kind of Democracy” (New York Times)
An opinion article cited IFPRI research on the impact that COVID-19 has had on poverty and food security in Myanmar.
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“Consequences of COVID-19″ (Ahram Online)
An article reporting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economies and labor markets cited IFPRI research estimating impacts in Egypt.
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“What child stunting numbers tell us about north-east Indian states” (India Spend)
This featured article on child stunting in India cited IFPRI research analyzing data from India’s new National Family Health Survey.
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“Ministry set to lift maize export ban” (The Nation)
An article reporting on debate over Malawi’s maize export ban cited IFPRI research amid competing claims on the average price of maize in the country.
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