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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Liangzhi You

Liangzhi You is a Senior Research Fellow and theme leader in the Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit, based in Washington, DC. His research focuses on climate resilience, spatial data and analytics, agroecosystems, and agricultural science policy. Gridded crop production data of the world (SPAM) and the agricultural technology evaluation model (DREAM) are among his research contributions. 

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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Innovation Policy and Scaling

Guush Berhane

Senior Research Fellow

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Bio

Guush Berhane is a Senior Research Fellow in the Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit. His research focuses on policies and innovations to promote agricultural transformation, rural livelihoods, and well-being, and on the impact of social protection interventions in mitigating food insecurity and vulnerability. Much of his research is based on econometric and quasi-experimental impact evaluation methods. His most recent work extends to understanding welfare outcomes in conflict and fragility settings and interventions to facilitate post-conflict rehabilitation and rebuilding. He has ongoing research in Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Between 2009 and 2020, he was part of IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP) based in Ethiopia and has extensive experience in designing and conducting large-scale household surveys as well as wider engagements with policymakers and communities. His work has been published in journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Land Use Policy. Guush holds a PhD in Economics and a master’s degree in Development Economics from Wageningen University, Netherlands.

Publications

Google Scholar Citations

RePEc Author Profile

Publications

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Journal Article

Conflicts, crop choice, and agricultural investments: Empirical evidence from Nigeria

2025Amare, Mulubrhan; Abay, Kibrom A.; Berhane, Guush; Andam, Kwaw S.; Adeyanju, Dolapo
Details

Conflicts, crop choice, and agricultural investments: Empirical evidence from Nigeria

Conflict remains a major driver of poverty in Africa. Conflicts and political instability in the region have been increasing recently and are drawing more attention in public discourse. While it is widely acknowledged that conflicts disrupt agricultural production and food systems, the full extent of the damage inflicted on the lives and livelihoods of farming households and the mechanisms to redress this harm remain poorly understood. In particular, the link between violent conflicts and households’ land allocation and related agricultural investment decisions remains understudied. In this study, we use geocoded longitudinal data along with detailed agricultural panel household surveys in Nigeria to assess the impact of violent conflicts on crop choice decisions and related agricultural investments. Specifically, we explore how farmers’ land allocation and agricultural investment decisions relate or respond to the outbreak and intensity of violent conflicts. We find that violent conflicts are associated with a reduction in the share of both land area cultivated and area harvested. We also find suggestive evidence that violent conflicts may shape farmers’ crop choices and related investments, as violent conflicts are associated with reduction in the share of land allocated to long-term crops (e.g., perennial crops, trees, roots and tubers). Overall, our findings suggest that violent conflicts can negatively influence farmers’ agricultural investments directly by affecting both land utilization patterns and portfolio allocation across activities with varying returns to investments.

Year published

2025

Authors

Amare, Mulubrhan; Abay, Kibrom A.; Berhane, Guush; Andam, Kwaw S.; Adeyanju, Dolapo

Citation

Amare, Mulubrhan; Abay, Kibrom A.; Berhane, Guush; Andam, Kwaw S.; and Adeyanju, Dolapo. 2025. Conflicts, crop choice, and agricultural investments: Empirical evidence from Nigeria. Land Use Policy 148(January 2025): 107391. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2024.107391

Country/Region

Nigeria

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Western Africa; Conflicts; Investment; Smallholders; Decision Making; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2024.107391 Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Journal Article

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Working Paper

Securing food, building livelihoods? A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme

2024Hoddinott, John; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Kumar, Neha; Lind, Jeremy; Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum
Details

Securing food, building livelihoods? A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme

-We assess the impact of a large-scale social protection intervention, Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), over a 15-year period. -We find that the PSNP had a positive impact on food security but inconsistent impacts on assets. There were positive impacts on fertilizer use, investments in terracing, and cereal yields but only when the program was twinned with complementary programming. -The PSNP enabled households to be more resilient to covariate shocks. There were no adverse incentive effects on labour supply or fertility. There is some evidence that it improved schooling outcomes and reduced child labour but not child nutrition outcomes. -Payment levels, uncertainty about when payments would take place, and processes associated with making payments all played a role in generating these mixed impacts. -These also illustrate that while complementary programming can enhance the impact of transfers, adding complementary programming at scale is challenging when resources are limited.

Year published

2024

Authors

Hoddinott, John; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Kumar, Neha; Lind, Jeremy; Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum

Citation

Hoddinott, John; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hirvonen, Kalle; Kumar, Neha; Lind, Jeremy; Sabates-Wheeler, Rachel; and Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum. 2024. Securing food, building livelihoods? A 15-year appraisal of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme. WIDER Working Paper 2024/76. Helsinki: UNU-WIDER. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/2024/539-4

Country/Region

Ethiopia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Food Security; Social Protection; Fertilizers; Terrace Cropping; Cereal Crops; Resilience; Labour; Nutrition

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.35188/unu-wider/2024/539-4 Source record

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Working Paper

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Working Paper

Targeting social assistance in fragile settings: An experiment on community-based targeting

2024Abay, Kibrom A.; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Tafere, Kibrom; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum
Details

Targeting social assistance in fragile settings: An experiment on community-based targeting

Targeting is an important but challenging process in the design and delivery of social and humanitarian assistance programs. Community-based targeting (CBT) approaches are often preferred for their local information advantages, especially when data-driven methods are not feasible. However, how different variants of CBT approaches fare under various constraints and environments remains unclear. For example, it is not obvious whether agents involved in CBT maximize the number of beneficiaries or the intensity of transfers when given different levels of discretion or they face budget constraints. We implemented a clustered randomized control trial among community leaders in 180 villages in Ethiopia to evaluate how community leaders target and allocate resources when they face budget constraints and are in the presence (absence) of discretion. We find that under resource constraints, community leaders prefer to maximize the number of beneficiaries even at the expense of thinly spreading budgets (reducing average transfers to beneficiaries). Community leaders are keen to minimize exclusion errors even at the expense of increased inclusion errors, suggesting that community leaders may be sensitive to potential communal repercussions and hence prefer to accommodate beneficiaries who would otherwise be excluded based on survey-based measures and indicators of poverty. Consistent with this, we find that offering community leaders some level of discretion helps them reduce exclusion errors and include those most deprived or those affected by armed conflicts. Finally, we find that community leaders are more vulnerable to favoritism when real stakes (rather than hypothetical) are involved, budgets are relatively larger, and they lack discretion. We offer nuanced evidence about the implications of implementing CBT designs in the absence of incentives for community leaders to reveal how they use local information.

Year published

2024

Authors

Abay, Kibrom A.; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Tafere, Kibrom; Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum

Citation

Abay, Kibrom A.; Berhane, Guush; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Tafere, Kibrom; and Taffesse, Alemayehu Seyoum. 2024. Targeting social assistance in fragile settings: An experiment on community-based targeting. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2289. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

Country/Region

Ethiopia

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Community Development; Fragility; Social Protection; Targeting

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Working Paper

Blogs

Grappling with compounding crises in domestic fertilizer markets in Africa: The case of Ethiopia
IFPRI Blog
 | 
January 16, 2024

Grappling with compounding crises in domestic fertilizer markets in Africa: The case of Ethiopia

By Kibrom Abay, Thomas W. Assefa, Guush Berhane, Gashaw Tadesse Abate, and Charlotte Hebebrand

Local effects of global shocks persist.

Ethiopia’s social safety net effective in limiting COVID-19 impacts on rural food insecurity
IFPRI Blog
 | 
January 28, 2021

Ethiopia’s social safety net effective in limiting COVID-19 impacts on rural food insecurity

By Kibrom A. Abay, Guush Berhane, John Hoddinott, and Kibrom Tafere

A survey shows such programs can be effective in addressing the impacts of sudden shocks.

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2023 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting
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July 23 to 25, 2023

2023 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting

Event: July 23, 2023 – 8:30 AM to July 25, 2023 – 4:15 PM EDT. IFPRI is participating in the 2023 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting.

2021 ReSAKSS Conference
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November 15 to 17, 2021

2021 ReSAKSS Conference

Virtual Event: Nov 15, 2021 – 07:00 AM to Nov 17, 2021 – 10:30 AM EST. IFPRI is participating in the virtual 2021 ReSAKSS Conference. 

31st International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE)
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August 17 to 31, 2021

31st International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE)

Virtual Event: AUG 17, 2021 – 08:00 AM to AUG 31, 2021 08:00 PM EDT. IFPRI is participating in the 31st Conference of Agriculture Economists organized by the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE). 

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