The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is a new survey-based index designed to measure the empowerment, agency, and inclusion of women in the agricultural sector. The WEAI was initially developed as a tool to reflect women’s empowerment that may result from the United...

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) baseline survey results, summarizing both findings from the WEAI survey and the relationships between the WEAI and various outcomes of interest to the US Government’s Feed the...

Being able to access, control, and own productive assets such as land, labor, finance, and social capital enables people to create stable and productive lives. Yet relatively little is known about how agricultural development programs can most effectively deliver these outcomes of well-being,...

In developing countries where access to and use of renewable natural resources essential to rural livelihoods are highly contested, improving cooperation in their management is increasingly seen as an important element in strategies for peacebuilding, conflict prevention, and longer-term...

The food security crisis, international “land grabs,†and new markets for environmental services have drawn renewed attention to the role of natural resource competition in the livelihoods of the rural poor. While significant empirical research has focused on diagnosing the links...

This paper reviews the central role of institutions for climate-smart agriculture (CSA), focusing on the role of institutions in promoting inclusivity, providing information, enabling local level innovation, encouraging investment, and offering insurance to enable smallholders, women, and poor...

In recent years, prices of agricultural land have increased quickly, actually doubling and tripling in many parts of the world. This land value reassessment has been prompted by rising crop prices and perceived land scarcity. But even as the value of land rises, land degradation continues and...

Though famine has affected many parts of the world in the twentieth century, the conditions that produce famine—extreme poverty, armed conflict, economic and political turmoil, and climate shocks—are now most prevalent in Africa. Researchers differ on how to address this problem...

Resilience is a desirable capability of people to deal with shocks without significant loss of livelihood, health, and nutrition. Resilience is impaired by exclusion and other forms of discrimination. Exclusion is part of a larger set of causal factors that determine marginality, which is a root...

"Research on which this report is based was initiated in 1986 in the aftermath of severe famines in several African countries in 1985" Preface.