This report summarizes the impacts of a 2014-2019 RCT spanning Mozambique and Tanzania in partnership with CIMMYT to test the impacts of bundling an innovative type of insurance with drought-tolerant maize to expand drought protection for small-scale farming families.
We paired drought-tolerant maize with index insurance designed to protect farmers when even drought-tolerant seeds fail. Only farmers using drought-tolerant seed bundled with index insurance bounced back quickly from severe shock seasons. After seeing the technologies work, they also increased their production to higher, pre-shock levels—a phenomenon we call Resilience+.
Our results on soil variation shows an opportunity to target improved seed and other interventions based on the variation in soils within a village or larger geographic area.
In mid-altitude regions, the option to purchase WSC maize seed unambiguously increased productivity, but most significantly among better-resourced farmers who had historically used hybrid seed.
With new drought tolerant (DT) maize varieties ready to go to market, and with our growing knowledge of how to design effective insurance products for small-scale agriculture, now is an opportune moment to close this critical knowledge gap.
Based on lessons learned in the first few years of its program, Oxfam America recently formulated an ambitious coordinated SRI intervention that targets entire irrigation blocs, a network of shared canals and drains, with incentives for full SRI adoption.
This new BASIS research project will test this hypothesis, evaluating the impact of a new seed market actor like WSC on the incomes and well-being of the small-scale farming community.
