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News & Features

News

Empowering Women in Nepal with Goats, Training and Community

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.

The BASIS MRR Innovation Lab Stands for Equity, Inclusion and Justice

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.

COVID-19 and Development Innovation

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.

The Year the Short Rains Never Stopped in Kenya

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.

Lessons to Take a Successful Resilience-focused Research Project to Scale

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.

Leveraging Machine Learning to Improve Livestock Insurance for Pastoralist Families

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.

The Challenge of Taking Chickpea Innovations from the Lab to the 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.