Rethinking Resilience: Adapting to a Changing Climate
Climate change is accelerating, and harmful weather events—such as extreme storms, droughts, heat waves, or wildfires—are becoming more frequent and severe. Lower-income countries suffer more deaths and lasting losses from disasters than richer countries. Climate shocks push vulnerable households into poverty and cause small businesses to fail, reversing development gains.
“Rethinking Resilience” urges developing countries to adopt policies that empower individuals, households, farms, and firms to take proactive measures. Current approaches rely too heavily on government programs and investments, such as subsidies and cash transfers, which are reactive rather than preventive. Developing economies lack the resources of high-income countries, making them more vulnerable.
- Published in CLIMATE CHANGE, NEW PUBLICATIONS
Financial Inclusion in Food, Land and Water Systems: What Works for Women?
This brief draws on distilled evidence from research and practice from CGIAR and beyond to highlight how to design financial products, approaches and processes to reach, benefit and empower women through financial inclusion.
Women across Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) contribute to food, land and water systems (FLWS) as agricultural producers, entrepreneurs, consumers, and conservationists. They produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in most developing countries, are responsible for half of the world’s food production but remain disproportionately excluded from financial services. 742 million rural women who are also least educated, among the poorest and have low or no access to mobile phones are left out of formal financial services, globally. This exclusion discounts their essential roles in the sector, stymies their potential, and hinders their well-being and that of their households and communities. Barriers to women’s financial inclusion include lack of collateral, cumbersome documentation and procedural requirements, legal discrimination, financial illiteracy, discriminatory social norms, financial risk aversion and lack of gender disaggregated data. Financial service providers generally view rural women as risky or unprofitable, moreover, financial services are poorly adapted for low-literacy, low-income women.
- Published in GENDER, NEW PUBLICATIONS
Investigating the roles and challenges of female extension workers: a systematic review
As the demographics of farming communities change and innovations evolve, the role of female extension workers becomes more critical, especially in reaching out to women farmers who are often primary agricultural laborers in rural households and supporting them to adopt new practices and technologies. This study investigates how the roles and challenges of female extension workers are represented in the literature and what assumptions and implications underpin these representations.
- Published in GENDER, NEW PUBLICATIONS
Smart Agricultural Technology
Agriculture is undergoing a rapid digital transformation that challenges its ecological, social, and ethical foundations. A total of 136 documents were analysed through bibliometric and thematic synthesis. Results show that A5.0 represents a philosophical and structural evolution beyond the efficiency-oriented logic of A4.0, integrating distributed computing, explainable artificial intelligence, digital twins, and collaborative robotics within ecologically restorative and socially inclusive frameworks. However, while A5.0 strengthens resource efficiency, resilience, and certain social segments through open-source technologies and participatory design, gaps remain in policy coherence, emotional engagement, and human–machine co-learning. To address these, the study proposes two complementary agroecological principles, cognitive symbiosis and emotional ecology, emphasising shared intelligence and affective stewardship between humans, machines, and ecosystems. Overall, Agriculture 5.0 reframes digitalisation as a human-ecological partnership that can operationalise agroecology’s ethical goals if governed by inclusion, transparency, and regeneration rather than control and optimisation.
- Published in AGROECOLOGY, NEW PUBLICATIONS
Farmers’ willingness to pay for a digital extension tool in Sri Lanka
List experiments utilize indirect survey questions to reduce social desirability bias in measures of sensitive behaviours and sentiments. While often used to assess retrospective behaviour or opinions of respondents, list experiments have not been widely applied to assessing “deep” parameters of economic models, such as willingness to pay. Common stated preference methods of estimating willingness to pay may be impacted by social desirability bias, particularly when a product has been provided to survey recipients for free. List experiments can uncover the share of respondents willing to pay a given price while reducing social desirability bias. Repeating the method at a variety of prices recovers a partial demand curve. This study discusses the conditions required to satisfy the list experiment validity assumptions and demonstrates the method in an e-extension platform randomized control trial in Sri Lanka. We show that the “no design effect” assumption for list experiments requires that the budget constraint for a household be non-binding. Under conditions where that assumption is likely to hold, we find direct estimates overstate willingness to pay at low prices. Our findings suggest list experiments may provide a cheap method of more accurately assessing the typically large share of respondents unwilling to pay any non-zero-sum (extensive margin) but are less effective at reducing bias from exaggerated demand (intensive margin).
- Published in NEW PUBLICATIONS, SRI LANKA
Rural transformation through agribusiness incubation-The evolving Asian experience
Agribusiness incubation (ABI) has emerged as a transformative strategy for revitalizing rural livelihoods, engaging youth in agriculture, and promoting sustainable technologies. This publication examines the pivotal role of ABIs in reshaping the agrifood system by providing essential support services and fostering collaboration among smallholder farmers and emerging entrepreneurs. As countries in the Asia Pacific implement diverse ABI models, the successful experiences from the Republic of Korea, India, the Philippines, and Viet Nam offer valuable lessons for addressing rural poverty, attracting youth, and mitigating climate change challenges.
- Published in NEW PUBLICATIONS
Future of Pulses and Legumes Seed Systems in India
This policy brief is a collaborative outcome of the Policy Dialogue jointly hosted by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) and the Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy (CRISP) in November 2024. The dialogue brought together key stakeholders to deliberate on enhancing seed systems for dryland crops in India. The brief presents actionable recommendations to align seed policy with the evolving needs of farmers, researchers, and the private sector. It underscores the importance of supportive regulatory frameworks, increased public-private collaboration, and the role of innovation in improving access to quality seeds for climate-resilient agriculture.
- Published in NEW PUBLICATIONS
Gender Responsive Digital Extension and Advisory Services in Bangladesh and India
This paper jointly written by the Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy (CRISP), Hyderabad, India, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) explores the gender responsiveness of digital EAS in two Southern Asian countries – Bangladesh and India – where women play a critical role in agrifood systems.
Both countries have piloted and scaled various digital EAS models over the past decade. The study investigated the barriers that limit women’s uptake and effective use of these services.
- Published in NEW PUBLICATIONS