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.

SimPastoralist is a digital app the MRR Innovation Lab is using in northern Kenya to explain index-based livestock insurance while collecting data that can help design insurance that responds better to women’s needs.

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.

The MRR Innovation Lab invites researchers at U.S. universities to submit proposals for four-year research projects that develop or test innovative ways to promote food security and resilience worldwide.

Congressman John Garamendi and Patricia Garamendi met with the MRR Innovation Lab at UC Davis in August, 2019 to discuss the new research program and UC Davis and how a technology to manage risk could stabilize communities across Africa’s drought-prone Sahel.

Michael Carter and Christopher Barrett were honored by their peers in July, 2019 for their foundational paper on the economics of poverty traps in developing countries.

The University of California, Davis, will lead a new global research program to build and test ways to overcome some of the biggest remaining challenges for lifting and keeping rural families out of poverty in developing countries.

Humanitarian efforts in central Mozambique have saved lives and helped families to begin their recovery from losses to cyclone Idai, but many challenges remain. Research on a similar disaster in Honduras two decades ago suggests that long-term support is likely necessary for families who already struggled before the storm.

In this Q&A, AMA Innovation Lab investigator Dean Yang discusses the economic impact of the money migrants send back to their home countries and how migration affects development in migrants’ home countries.