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Agriculture

Building Resilience in Burkina Faso: Longitudinal Assessment Results

The Building the Resilience of Vulnerable Communities in Burkina Faso (BRB) project leveraged women’s savings groups as a platform to provide complementary services in nutrition and agricultural education, access to agricultural extension support, linkages to formal agricultural and micro-business financing, and gender dialogues with the aim of improving household resilience. A mixed-methods, longitudinal quasi-experimental research design implemented between 2016 and 2018 found that BRB participants experienced improved food security, dietary diversity, self-perceived resilience and sustained savings accumulation despite an economic downturn experienced in 2017 due to a drought and subsequent poor harvests. Women reported increases in the implementation of new income-generating activities, earned income, the adoption of climate-smart agricultural techniques and improvements in harvest production as a result of the project interventions. There were mixed outcomes in social norms related to decision-making power, fear of spouse, and confidence in speaking out in mixed-gender forums. Despite the inherent difficulty in measuring changes in resilience, the research supporting the BRB project suggests a sense of “bouncing back” among the treatment group after the 2017 drought in Burkina Faso compared to the comparison group.

Coffee, Cocoa, and the Cutting Edge

March 07, 2019

That morning ritual loved by millions, a simple cup of coffee, may one day be a thing of the past. New research shows that 60% of the world’s 124 species of wild coffee face a mounting threat of extinction, mostly as a result of deforestation. This potential loss of genetic diversity would, in turn, limit the ways in which coffee could be adapted to a changing climate and disease threats.

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Impact:Mother and Child Health Project

In a part of India where over half of children and women suffer from anemia, the Maa aur Shishu Swathya (MASS), or Mother and Child Health Project, has worked since 2015 to bring women and their families an integrated, comprehensive package of financial services, health financing, health education and linkages to formal health providers. Find out how this project has improved life-saving knowledge of good nutrition and health practices.

Africa’s Growing Agri-Tech Calls for Rapid Policy Response

June 12, 2018 by Alfred Kojo Yeboah

Bennett comes from a long farming tradition and grew maize much the same way as his Ghanaian father. So he was skeptical when Opoku, a young agricultural extension agent, said he would help improve Bennett’s farm. Opuku carried just a mobile tablet loaded with practical farming advice and agribusiness information. No farm equipment. No seeds. No fertilizer.

Pro-WEAI Baseline Results from the initiative Building the Resilience of Vulnerable Communities in Burkina Faso (BRB)

This report documents a quantitative assessment completed as part of a pilot test of the pro-WEAI for the “Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project – Phase 2” (GAAP2) project led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) was launched by IFPRI, Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and USAID’s Feed the Future program in February 2012 and was the first comprehensive standardized measure to capture women’s empowerment and inclusion in the agricultural sector.

Building Resilience in Burkina Faso: Impact Study Endline Results

Building Resilience in Burkina Faso (BRB) takes a multi-sectoral approach to improving household resilience and food security and features the innovative use of community-based women’s savings groups as a platform for providing an integrated package of agricultural, nutrition, financial services, and women’s empowerment programming to help thousands of savings group members overcome many of the geographic, cultural, social, and economic constraints that hamper their resilience in the face of shocks and disasters.

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