A new effort led from UC Davis is seeking to build on prior USAID-supported research in Nepal to deliver an innovative set of financial tools to small-scale women farmers to reduce their risk of losing crops to weather- and climate-related shocks.

Focusing development programs on women can have impacts that go beyond income and poverty. In Nepal, a Feed the Future research team found that a prominent asset transfer and training program had important impacts on women's empowerment.

NDVI has been commonly used to build index insurance, a type of insurance that in the past decade has protected tens of thousands of pastoralist families in eastern Africa from drought. Now, a new technology may be on the brink of beating NDVI on predicting forage quality, and it comes from an entirely different field.

By transforming how chickpeas can withstand a complex set of problems, beyond just drought, researchers hope to aid smallholder farmers. But ultimately, getting these improved varieties to farmers in the field is a complex task that requires work beyond just the laboratory.