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Fostering social inclusion in development-oriented digital food system interventions
No full textCONTEXT Digital innovations can enhance the participation of often-marginalized social groups – including women and resource-poor farmers in low- and middle-income countries – in sustainable, profitable food systems. But digital interventions can also reinforce existing inequities by further increasing the competitive advantage of user groups privileged with literacy, access to smartphones, or high investment capacity. To ensure that the digital transformation in the Global South leaves no one behind, therefore, deliberate efforts are needed to promote the inclusivity of emerging digital innovations. To date, however, there is a lack of practical guidelines and tools to critically assess, demonstrate, and enhance the inclusivity of digital food systems interventions. Too often, inclusivity remains a blurry concept and distant objective. In result, digital development researchers and practitioners have limited incentives for investing time and effort into safeguarding inclusivity
Feasibility of using an artificial intelligence-based telephone application for dietary assessment and nudging to improve the quality of food choices of female adolescents in Vietnam: Evidence from a randomized pilot study
No full textBackground Adolescent nutrition has faced a policy neglect, partly owing to the gaps in dietary intake data for this age group. The Food Recognition Assistance and Nudging Insights (FRANI) is a smartphone application validated for dietary assessment and to influence users toward healthy food choices.
Objectives This study aimed to assess the feasibility (adherence, acceptability, and usability) of FRANI and its effects on food choices and diet quality in female adolescents in Vietnam.
Methods Adolescents (N = 36) were randomly selected from a public school and allocated into 2 groups. The control group received smartphones with a version of FRANI limited to dietary assessment, whereas the intervention received smartphones with gamified FRANI. After the first 4 wk, both groups used gamified FRANI for further 2 wk. The primary outcome was the feasibility of using FRANI as measured by adherence (the proportion of completed food records), acceptability and usability (the proportion of participants who considered FRANI acceptable and usable according to answers of a Likert questionnaire). Secondary outcomes included the percentage of meals recorded, the Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDDW) and the Eat-Lancet Diet Score (ELDS). Dietary diversity is important for dietary quality, and sustainable healthy diets are important to reduce carbon emissions. Poisson regression models were used to estimate the effect of gamified FRANI on the MDDW and ELDS.Nudging for GoodNutrition, Diets, and Health (NDH); Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI
Combining approaches for systemic behaviour change in groundwater governance
No full textOver-extraction of groundwater is a prominent challenge in India, with profound implication for food security, livelihoods, and economic development. As groundwater is an ‘invisible’ and mobile common pool resource, sustainable governance of groundwater is complex, multifaceted, requiring coordination among various stakeholders at different scales. It remains an open question as to what can be done to strengthen the governance of groundwater, particularly on the scale necessary to address widespread depletion of resources. The growing competition over groundwater resources calls for systemic changes towards sustainable water management. These require understanding the behaviours of actors in the system network, as well as the institutions that shape the direction in which the system moves. In this paper, we offer a behavioural perspective to system transformation and apply it to the example of an Indian NGO working on sustainable natural resource governance. The organisation, Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), has been co-designing and using various institutional tools for groundwater governance with the collaboration of other NGOs and government partners, academic and research organisations towards strengthening governance of water. At the local level, these include groundwater monitoring and crop water budgeting, combined with experiential learning tools such as games for demand management, and supply side interventions to support water harvesting and recharge. These tools are combined with efforts to strengthen multi-actor platforms, building coalitions and capacity of government, civil society and private sector actors to support groundwater governance at scale. By combining local and systemic approaches, the aim is to influence water governance on a larger scale and contribute to the sustainable management of water resources in India. Our reflections illustrate how conceptual thinking can inform multi-methods approaches which consider that sustainably improving groundwater management at large scale requires inter-linked behavioural changes of diverse actors. Our approach constitutes critical reflection and conceptualization, based on situated knowledge which contributes to designing better adapted and more powerful intervention strategies through informed argument.Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR
Educational impacts of an unconditional cash transfer program in Mali
No full textPoverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI); Nutrition, Diets, and Health (NDH
Famine in Gaza, questions for research and preventive action
No full textThe ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unprecedented in terms of the share of the population experiencing acute food insecurity and famine and the speed of the onset of the crisis. Research can help understand and anticipate the long-term impacts of the conflict on people and livelihoods, design more effective humanitarian support systems and identify options for creating resilient post-conflict livelihoods.DG
Special issue opening editorial: Designing, assessing and scaling approaches for integrated seed sector development
No full textMarkets, Trade, and Institutions (MTI); Innovation Policy and Scaling (IPS
Impact of climate change on trade in Africa
No full textThe literature on the complex relationship between trade and climate change is rich. While trade can affect climate change through dirty production techniques or carbon emissions due to transport (Brenton and Chemutai 2021), climate change can affect trade through its effect on agricultural productivity (Ben Zaied and Cheikh 2015; Chandio et al. 2020), production, and thus countries’ specialization (Gouel and Laborde 2021), primarily due to high temperatures and water stress (Hamududu and Ngoma 2020). As Africa is a net importer of agricultural products, the consequence is that climate change will likely affect food security in the medium and long term. Against this background, the objective of this chapter is twofold. First, we examine the extent to which African countries are exposed to climate change relative to other regions of the world. Second, we show how Africa’s comparative advantages can be altered with rising temperatures and water stress. Our main findings show that climate change effects in Africa are more pronounced than in other regions, reflected in the increase in extreme weather events associated with rising temperatures and greater variability in precipitation. These developments are likely to increase the number of food insecure people. Furthermore, we identify how climate change can affect African countries’ specialization based on products’ sensitivity to changes in temperature and their dependence on water. We show that several crops (such as leguminous vegetables, edible nuts and coconuts, groundnuts, oilseeds, and oleaginous fruits) will be affected by climate change. Other crops’ production may be less affected, but their future expansion may be limited by climate change–related factors.Markets, Trade, and Institutions (MTI); CP
The true costs of food production in Kenya and Viet Nam
No full textSustainable agrifood systems (AFS) provide food security and nutrition without compromising economic, social, and environmental objectives. However, many AFS generate substantial unaccounted for environmental, social, and health costs. True cost accounting (TCA) is one method that adds direct and external costs to find the “true cost” of food production, which can inform policies to reduce externalities or adjust market prices. We find that for Kenya— considering the entire food system, including crops, livestock, fishing, and value addition sectors at the national level—external costs represent 35 percent of the output value. Social costs account for 73 percent of the total external costs, while environmental costs are 27 percent. In contrast, in Viet Nam, where total external costs represent 15 percent of the output value, the environmental costs (75 percent) dominate social costs. At the subnational level, in the three Kenyan counties (Kisumu, Vihiga, and Kajiado) covered by the CGIAR Research Initiative on Nature-Positive Solutions (NATURE+), external costs (or the true cost gap) represent about 30 percent of all household crop production costs. Those external costs are overwhelmingly dominated by social (84 percent) over environmental (16 percent) externalities. In Viet Nam's Sa Pa and Mai Son districts, external costs represent about 24 percent of all household crop production costs. Environmental externalities (61 percent) are greater than social ones (39 percent). In Kenya, forced labor is the main social (and overall) external impact driven by factors ranging from "less severe" financial coercion to "more severe" forms of physical coercion. Land occupation is the most important environmental impact, resulting from occupation of lands for cultivation rather than conservation, while underpayment (low wages) and low profits are important social costs that are closely associated with the prevailing gender wage gap and occurrence of harassment. Soil degradation is the only other environmental impact, linked with the use of inorganic fertilizers (60 percent of households) and pesticides (36 percent). In Viet Nam, land occupation is the most important external impact, followed by soil degradation and contributions to climate change, primarily due to widespread use of inorganic fertilizers (98 percent of households) and pesticides (93 percent). Underpayment and insufficient income are significant social costs, followed by the gender wage gap and child labor. Crop production systems in Kenya exhibit relatively high labor-related costs compared with nonlabor inputs, with relatively lower intensity in the use of inorganic fertilizer and other chemical inputs and lower crop yields. This production system leads to relatively greater social externalities. Conversely, crop yields in Viet Nam are significantly higher than those in Kenya, likely due to the extensive use of inorganic fertilizers representing the largest direct cost component and leading to a relatively higher level of environmental externalities. Because external costs represent a significant part of the total cost of food production, policy and investments to minimize these costs are essential to a nature-positive AFS that is environmentally sustainable and socially equitable. Strategies to reach this goal include regulatory adjustments, investments in resource efficient infrastructure and technologies that minimize costs, and the prudent management of environmentally impactful production inputs and factors.Innovation Policy and Scaling (IPS); Natural Resources and Resilience (NRR
Cooperation among community leaders: The role of women’s leadership and exposure to conflict
No full textIn rural settings, community leaders play important roles in mobilizing resources and delivering public goods and services. However, little is known about their attributes and incentives in delivering these public goods and services. Exploiting survey, lab-in-the-field experiment, and geo-referenced data, we study the role of leaders, especially women’s leadership, and their exposure to conflict in explaining differences in cooperation among com-munity leaders in Ethiopia. We measure cooperation through a public-good experiment and examine the implications of community leaders’ characteristics. We then merge these lab-in-the field experimental data with geo-referenced data on conflict exposure to examine the implication of different types of conflict on community leaders’ cooperation behavior. We find that female leaders contribute more to public goods than their male counterparts. For example, compared to those assuming the highest official administrative responsibility in the village, women leaders contribute about 11 percent more to the public good. We also document nuanced findings that reconcile existing mixed evidence on the implication of exposure to conflict on cooperation: while conflict events that affect the whole community, such as political violence (including battles) are associated with higher cooperation, other types of conflict (e.g., demonstrations and riots) are associated with lower levels of cooperation. Finally, we identify additional predictors of cooperation among community leaders, including beliefs about other leaders’ cooperative behavior. These findings shed light on potential avenues for facilitating and fostering cooperation among community leaders.Development Strategies and Governance (DSG
To defer or differ: Experimental evidence on the role of cash transfers on Nigerian couples’ decision-making
No full textWe conduct an original lab-in-the-field experiment on the decision–making process of married couples over the allocation of rival and non-rival household goods. The experiment measures individual preferences over allocations and traces the process of deferral, consultation, communication and accommodation by which couples implement these preferences. We find few differences in individual preferences over allocations of goods. However, wives and husbands have strong preferences over process: women prefer to defer decisions to their husbands even when deferral is costly and is not observed by the husband; men rarely defer under any condition. Our study follows a randomized controlled trial that ended a year earlier and gave large cash transfers over eighteen months to half of the women in the study. We estimate the effect of treatment on the demand for agency among women and find that the receipt of cash transfers does not change women’s bargaining process except in a secret condition when the decision to defer is shrouded from her husband. This suggests that the cash transfer to women increases their demand for agency but does not change the intra-household balance of power enough to allow them to express it publicly.Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion (PGI