Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety FY2023 Annual Report
The most vulnerable rural communities face a compounding of new and ongoing crises. These include continuing difficulties created by the COVID-19 pandemic and new crises such as war in Ukraine, conflict and extreme drought in East Africa and flooding across Pakistan and Nigeria. At the center of each of these crises is food. The World Food Programme reports that the number of people experiencing acute food insecurity has increased from 135 million just two years ago to 345 million today.
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience at UC Davis was established to generate field-tested evidence on how to meet many of these challenges. Through our network of principal investigators at research institutions across the globe, we conduct research on how to strengthen food security and resilience at all levels, from systems to individual households and families.
In 2022 we made considerable progress on our 29 awarded projects across 12 countries. These projects include impact evaluations of active development programs as well as research that tests new approaches for strengthening food security and resilience. These include a new project that builds a technical definition and measure of resilience in the context of poverty traps and the true complexities facing rural households. These also include two seed grants that have been awarded full funding, one in Ethiopia and one in Ghana, both of which are testing innovations in agricultural index insurance. We reported results from two projects providing insights on how livelihood-building programs for women can generate resilience to hardships that include drought and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Source: USAID
Year: 2022
