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Including women in commercial agriculture benefits the whole household: Evidence from Uganda
Formally including Ugandan women in commercial agriculture—through contract ownership or behavior-change interventions—can increase women’s empowerment without reducing productivity, and with positive spillovers for household welfare and gender relations.Estimates suggest that there are 475 million smallholder farms in low- and middle-income countries, including 43 million in sub-Saharan Africa (Lowder et al. 2016, FAO 2017).
Cash or Food? Intrahousehold Preferences for Aid Modalities in Sudan
Families in crisis are often treated as a single unit, but new research from Sudan shows that husbands and wives often have very different ideas about what aid they need. To truly tackle hunger, it is important to look at who is actually making the decisions inside the home.
The Double Threat: How Conflict and Climate Change Disrupt Agricultural Input Use
We often talk about war and weather as separate disasters. But for a farmer, they are a combined force. New research shows that conflict doesn't just disrupt a single harvest; it destroys the economic systems and the very soil that families need to survive an unpredictable climate.
When milk quality pays: Evidence from an incentive experiment in Uganda
In many agricultural markets, the limited ability to measure product quality at the source and trace it through the supply chain remains a key barrier to improvement, as the absence of reliable quality information blunts incentives for upstream actors to invest in better practices. This challenge spans a wide range of value chains, but it is especially pronounced in the dairy sector. Milk from smallholder farmers is typically pooled and transported through multiple intermediaries before reaching processors, making it difficult to observe and reward high-quality production at any stage.
Analyzing the Economic Fallout of Conflict in the Sudan
Since April 2023, the Sudan has suffered from violent conflict that has displaced wide swathes of the population, significantly disrupted the economy, and led to skyrocketing unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity. Between December 2024 and May 2024, more than half of the country’s population experienced IPC Phase 3 food insecurity or higher, and millions of Sudanese have been without reliable access to food, healthcare, housing, and other critical services.