New research supported by USAID is learning whether investments in broadly based resilience helps families to withstand even this completely unexpected and global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Feed the Future Advancing Local Leadership, Innovation and Networks (ALL-IN) program has opened its 2020 call for research proposals from researchers at African institutions to advance host country leadership in defining and implementing research projects.

How a novel public-private partnership in Western Kenya helped a local seed company reach underserved communities of small-scale farmers with locally adapted improved seeds that transformed yields.

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.

In affirming our support for Black lives and justice for marginalized groups around the globe we join our colleagues in the UC Davis community and our broader research community, including our researchers and research partners, implementation partners and individual families who take part in our work.

Today, researchers are using the newest generations of satellite and Earth observation technologies to improve agricultural index insurance for development—and those improvements are accelerating.

These unprecedented times are testing the resilience of rural families and the food and market systems they rely on. The work we do has never been more important, and in spite of the challenges we all face, we will continue to make progress in building a more resilient future.

In Kenya, the heavy, extended short rains into 2020 have led to flooding for pastoralists in the north, while further south farmers have struggled with drying their harvest and planting under threat of huge swarms of locusts. Climate adaptation and resilience are critical as extreme weather becomes more common across Eastern Africa.

While bundling drought-tolerant maize with index insurance generated significant drought resilience for small-scale farmers, seed and insurance companies need continued support to scale the product, particularly where farmers have little experience with either improved seeds or insurance.