Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
CGIAR research on agricultural insurance: Past achievements and future research priorities
KEY MESSAGES • A recent external review of IFPRI’s research on agricultural insurance found that, since 2009, IFPRI has made important contributions to the literature on factors constraining farmers’ demand for agricultural insurance and on gender inclusiveness of insurance and, since 2015, has focused more specifically on developing new forms of insurance that can reduce basis risk at the farm level and make insurance more attractive to farmers. • IFPRI’s work on flexible insurance contracts, picture-based insurance, and bundling agricultural insurance with credit, seeds, and other agricultural services shows that well-designed insurance can significantly improve on standard index...
Gender dynamics in seed systems development
All agricultural production—whether of crops, trees, forages, livestock, or fish—starts with seeds,* mak-ing seed security vital to food security. Seed secu-rity means that producers—smallholder farmers es-pecially—have permanent and unrestricted access to adequate quantities of quality seed that is suita-ble to their agroecological conditions and socio-economic needs. Efforts to enhance seed security should be inclusive, without disparities related to in-come, social class, age, or gender. Yet, gender gaps reveal themselves across the seed system, in-cluding in the breeding, production, selection, and distribution stages, as well as in how the seeds are used and who reaps the benefits from this use.
Championing gender in agricultural services in Kenya
Key messages: • Champion farmers are male and female influencers recruited to support the delivery of agricultural services to fellow farmers within their communities (including seeds, advisories, and crop insurance), thereby promoting gender and social inclusion. • Providing insurance as a stand-alone product is too expensive to build a sustainable and cost-effective champion farmer model; there is a need to integrate the model with other services, including the provision of seeds, and to leverage government subsidies. • Champion farmers face steep competition from other service providers in the provision of seeds, but their networks give them opportunities to tap into underserved mar...
Gender and resilience to health shocks: Evidence from financial and health diaries in rural Kenya and Nigeria
Health shocks (unpredictable illnesses and injuries) are an important source of risk for individuals in developing countries. In the absence of formal financial products such as health insurance or health savings accounts, unexpected illness or injury can have severe consequences. The burden of responding to health shocks often falls disproportionately on women, since they usually act as primary caregivers in households, and as a result are responsible for managing the health of children or elderly dependents. Despite this, much research around the uptake of health insurance or other risk-management products focuses on households instead of individuals, without considering how gender may affect individual preferences for, and access to, these products. To address this issue, this policy brief uses a unique dataset on individuals from rural households in sub-Saharan Africa to demonstrate how the financial lives of men and women differ in important respects, and how these differences may have important implications for policy on universal access to health services.
A gender-responsive approach to designing agricultural risk management bundles
o Bundling agricultural insurance with risk-reducing agricultural technologies can lower the cost of insurance for farmers, but before implementing bundled solutions, it is important to analyze how these bundles would impact men and women differently. o Using a survey with 900 men and women farmers in Odisha, India, we find that women and men have similar farming practices and input use in general, but women face more difficulties in hiring labor and transplant rice later than men. o Using biophysical crop models, we show that this delay in transplanting lowers expected yields and increases risk exposure for women farmers. o Direct-seeded rice (DSR) is a promising alternative method for establishing rice that can help to mitigate the risks posed by climate change. Our findings indicate DSR is especially beneficial for women farmers. o Gender-responsive policies are needed to ensure that women farmers have equitable access to agricultural insurance and risk-reducing technologies.
Improving trust and reciprocity in agricultural input markets: A lab-in-the-field experiment in Bangladesh
Adoption of high-quality yet more expensive agricultural inputs remains low, in part because most inputs are experience goods: before purchase, buyers observe only price—not quality—providing sellers with opportunities to cheat on quality. Our lab-in-the-field experiment in Bangladesh replicates markets for such inputs, with input retailers (sellers) choosing price and quality, and farmers (buyers) choosing from which seller to purchase inputs. We analyze market behavior, including buyers’ trust and sellers’ reciprocity, and study the effects of buyer-driven accreditation and loyalty rewards for accredited sellers of high-quality products. Trust and reciprocity remain low: Sellers pr...
A new model for inclusive seed delivery: Lessons from a pilot study in Kenya: Leveraging champion farmers’ entrepreneurial know-how to reach the last mile
Climate change has exacerbated the frequency and severity of extreme weather events affecting the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa. Risks such as increased droughts, pests, floods, and heatwaves are projected to increase significantly in future years. The formal seed sector is an important entry point to help farmers better manage these risks, as it provides access to high-quality certified seeds of improved stress-tolerant varieties, selected and bred to maximize productivity in good years, whilst reducing the impact of climate change risks in bad years. The challenge, however, is that the formal market is not always inclusive and is more accessible to middle- or largescale (and often male) farmers. Smaller farmers (often female) are more likely to obtain seeds from informal sources (friends or peers) or collect their own seeds from the crops they grow. This creates social inequities in distribution channels for quality seeds; and in qualitative research, farmers informed us that the COVID-19 pandemic has further restricted their access to inputs.
Digital technologies for financial inclusion of smallholder farmers: Needs assessment in three states of India
Financial instruments such as savings, loans, and insurance are critical tools in managing risk for smallholder farmers across the developing world. Although smallholder farmers are disproportionately affected by adverse events, they are the least likely to have access to formal loans, insurance, or bank accounts, leaving them less prepared to manage weather and disaster risk. As the effects of climate change intensify, building resilience—the ability to mitigate, cope, and recover from shocks and stresses without compromising future welfare—is essential for reducing rural poverty and improving food and nutrition security.
Picture-Based Crop Insurance: Using farmers’ smartphone pictures to minimize the costs of loss verification
The Picture-Based Crop Insurance (PBI) project aims to develop a new way of delivering affordable and easy-to-understand crop insurance using farmers’ smartphone pictures to minimize the costs of loss verification. The project, funded by the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM), is a partnership between the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Borlaug Institute for South Asia (BISA), HDFC Ergo General Insur-ance, Limited, and researchers from The George Washington Uni-versity, Boston University, and Ghent University.
Promoting seed systems for stress-tolerant varieties at scale: Potential for bundling with insurance-advisory services
Smallholder farmers may suffer losses from ex-treme weather events, pests and disease. This is expected to worsen in the face of climate change. Natural disasters are a threat to food security not only ex post, by inducing farmers to sell their as-sets, keep children out of school or borrow at high rates; they also threaten livelihoods ex ante, by discouraging farmers from investing in high-return practices and technologies (Elbers et al., 2007). Fortunately, significant progress has been made in the past two decades in developing and releasing seeds with genetic traits that are more tolerant to weather shocks, pests and disease. These im-provements in seed technology are offering prom-ising pathways to improve farmers’ adaptive ca-pacity, increasing investments and thereby agri-cultural productivity (Emerick et al., 2016).
