Small-scale farmers often don't adopt technologies that build resilience, like stress-tolerant seeds and index insurance, because they don't provide benefits in every year. New research shows how to maximize learning with these technologies to quickly build lasting adoption and long-term resilience in rural communities.

In Tanzania, using a low-cost soil test to pair field-specific recommendations with subsidy vouchers benefitted farmers significantly in both yields and profits when (1) fertilizer recommendations were calibrated to the needs of individual farms and (2) a subsidy made the recommended fertilizers affordable. 

Resilience+ (also Resilience-Plus) describes when rural families are more immediately able to withstand a shock and when that knowledge increases their investment in agricultural productivity. Generating Resilience+ could accelerate efforts to reduce poverty and spur agricultural growth.

A printed phone directory in Tanzania had significant impacts by connecting small-scale farmers with agriculture-related enterprises. The project’s results suggest directory services have substantial value for agriculture.

In Tanzania, an experimental game found that a hybrid microloan with a 20% individual collateral increased individual effort and repayment for group loans while reducing the number of farmers who choose to borrow.

The AMA Innovation Lab is leading a pilot in Tanzania that bundles drought-tolerant maize with index insurance for seed replacement. Adoption rates and the effective triggering and distribution of in-kind payouts suggest this bundled approach could be successfully scaled more broadly.