The agricultural sector is a key driver of climate change and biodiversity loss and is in urgent
need for transition. NATURE+, a large-scale CGIAR agricultural development initiative, aims
to support small-holder farmers in shifting agrifood systems to more sustainable pathways by
adopting nature-positive solutions. With gender equality at its core, it is crucial to enhance
women’s opportunities and to identify any barriers to the adoption of nature-positive practices.

The Rethinking Food Markets and Value Chains for Inclusion and Sustainability Initiative aims to provide evidence on what types of bundled innovations, incentive structures, and policies are most effective at creating more equitable sharing of income and employment opportunities in growing food markets, while reducing the food sector’s environmental footprint. The Initiative is organized into four working groups (Work Packages-WP).

Maize is the major food crop in eastern and southern Africa, including Kenya. Maize-based farming systems make up the largest proportion of agricultural land, and maize is central to the food system, in both rural and urban areas. Because of its importance, maize has received wide attention from the government, including in policy and research. As a result, Kenya has been at the forefront of the “maize green revolution” in Africa (Hassan and Karanja 1997; Hassan, Njoroge et al. 1998c).

This brief identifies important constructs for assessing drivers of food choice behaviors and describes progress on the development of a repository of instruments and measures for assessing these constructs.
OBJECTIVES

List constructs that can be assessed to understand drivers of household and individual food choice behaviors.
Identify instruments and measures to assess each food choice construct and organize these into a searchable repository.
Illustrate the use of the Food Choice Repository.

Applying the difference-in-difference (DID) estimation procedure, this study quantifies the wheat blast (Magnaporthe oryzae pathotype Triticum) induced losses in wheat yield, quantity of wheat sold, consumed, or stored, as well as wheat grain value in Bangladesh in 2016 following a disease outbreak that affected over 15,000 ha. Estimates show that the blast-induced yield loss was 540 kg ha−1 on average for households in blast-affected districts. Estimated total wheat production loss was approximately 8,205 tons worth USD 2.1 million in during the 2016 outbreak.

The second phase of the Yam Improvement for Income and Food Security in West Africa (YIIFSWA II) project was implemented through a strong collaboration between research and private sector. Private seed companies were provided with a wide variety of training and development activities on good agronomic practices (GAPs). However, the effects of the training activities were yet to be evaluated.

Gender dynamics and norms are crucial for rural livelihoods and achieving food security. While norms related to ownership, management, product distribution, and sales methods are prevalent in dairy production, more research needs to be conducted in this area. This study hypothesized that innovative technologies introduced without considering gender dynamics and norms may limit the extent of transformative change.

Digitalization of agriculture (DA) has emerged as a powerful rural transformative force. However, the dynamics of how digitalization is changing smallholder farming practices at the heart of rural life remain underexplored. Here, we employ a mixed-method approach (1565 survey respondents, 16 focus group discussions, and 22 interviews) to examine farmers' experiences with digital agriculture services in Northern Ghana through a social practice theory (SPT) lens.

Current food systems fail to address the triple burden of malnutrition — undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and overnutrition (Popkin, 2019; Béné, 2019; Fanzo, 2020). The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that approximately 462 million people worldwide are underweight, while 1.9 billion adults (39%) are overweight or obese. In 2020, globally, 149 million children under the age of five were stunted, 45 million were wasted, and 38.9 million were overweight or obese (FAO, 2021).

Initiatives to combat climate change often strive to include women’s voices, but there is limited evidence on how this feature influences program design or its benefits for women. We examine the causal effect of women’s representation in climate-related deliberations using the case of community-managed forests in rural Malawi. We run a lab-in-the-field experiment that randomly varies the gender composition of six-member groups asked to privately vote, deliberate, then privately vote again on their preferred policy to combat local over-harvesting.

The cattle sector is strategic for both the economic development and food security of Africa, but the low availability and quality of forage puts the most vulnerable population at risk. Hybrid forages are an alternative for enhancing both food security and sustainability of the sector but adoption levels are still low in Africa, which is related to various factors such as the availability of seeds.