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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

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Khalid Siddig

Khalid Siddig is a Senior Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit and Program Leader for the Sudan Strategy Support Program. He is an agricultural economist with a focus on examining the impacts of potential shocks and the allocation of resources on economic growth, environmental sustainability, and income distribution through the lens of economywide and micro-level tools. 

Where we work

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Where we work

IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

Reduce Poverty and End Hunger and Malnutrition

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Jordi Ruiz Cirera/Panos

What’s New


Journal Article

An approach for assessing whether agricultural projects help smallholders transition to better livelihood strategies: A Malawian case study

2024Timu, Anne G.; Hazell, Peter; Savastano, Sara

An approach for assessing whether agricultural projects help smallholders transition to better livelihood strategies: A Malawian case study

Agricultural projects typically aim to promote the uptake of project components amongst targeted small farm populations to improve their farm productivity and welfare. While this approach can be an important first step towards improving smallholder livelihoods, it ignores alternative and often superior livelihood options that might arise within the rural transformation process, particularly in commercial agriculture and the rural nonfarm economy. We argue that the design of smallholder projects implemented within regions already undergoing a dynamic transformation and/or projects which have significant value chain components, should be broadened to assist smallholders in making successful transitions to their best livelihood options. For such projects, monitoring and evaluation activities should track livelihood transitions as well as the usual assessments of productivity and welfare outcomes. To help operationalize such an approach, we propose a typology of smallholder livelihood strategies that can track transitions over time and illustrate its use with data from the Sustainable Agricultural Production Program (SAPP), an agricultural value chain project in Malawi. Using available household panel data and quasi-experimental econometric approaches, we find that the project helped smallholders transition out of subsistence farming to market-oriented farming and helped already existing market-oriented farmers remain as such. Even though the project did not have any specific components designed to promote off-farm incomes, nevertheless, it facilitated many farm household transitions to off-farm diversified livelihoods, possibly due to spillover benefits generated within the local nonfarm economy. All SAPP facilitated transitions led to increases in household incomes. We conclude with some lessons for designing, monitoring, and the evaluation of future agricultural projects.

Year published

2024

Authors

Timu, Anne G.; Hazell, Peter; Savastano, Sara

Citation

Timu, Anne G.; Hazell, Peter; and Savastano, Sara. 2024. An approach for assessing whether agricultural projects help smallholders transition to better livelihood strategies: A Malawian case study. Food Policy 128(October 2024): 102728. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102728

Country/Region

Malawi

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Eastern Africa; Agricultural Products; Smallholders; Livelihoods; Rural Transformation; Impact Assessment; Small Farms

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Record type

Journal Article

Journal Article

Disclosure of violence against women and girls in Senegal

2024Peterman, Amber; Dione, Malick; Le Port, Agnes; Briaux, Justine; Lamesse, Fatma; Melissa, Hidrobo

Disclosure of violence against women and girls in Senegal

Measures of violence against women and girls (VAWG) are widely collected in surveys, yet estimates are acknowledged to be lower bounds of the true prevalence. This study reports on a survey experiment randomly assigning 3,400 women and girls to either face-to-face interviews or audio computer-assisted self-interviews (ACASI), a modality that increases privacy and confidentiality of responses. Results show the ACASI group discloses higher prevalence of lifetime intimate partner violence by 4 to 7 percentage points compared to face-to-face interviews. Differences in disclosure for nonpartner VAWG are even larger, ranging from 6 to 12 percentage points. Tests for correlates of characteristics that might lead to increased disclosure show few notable patterns. Overall results suggest ACASI are a promising way to encourage disclosure, however trade-offs include limits in the complexity of questions that can be asked and higher time costs associated with development and implementation of surveys. JEL Codes: C83, J12, J16

Year published

2024

Authors

Peterman, Amber; Dione, Malick; Le Port, Agnes; Briaux, Justine; Lamesse, Fatma; Melissa, Hidrobo

Citation

Peterman, Amber; Dione, Malick; Le Port, Agnes; Briaux, Justine; Lamesse, Fatma; and Melissa, Hidrobo. 2024. Disclosure of violence against women and girls in Senegal. World Bank Economic Review. Artcile in press. First published online September 6, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhae039

Country/Region

Senegal

Keywords

Africa; Western Africa; Domestic Violence; Gender-based Violence; Surveys; Women; Measurement

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Journal Article

Journal Article

Global food value chains and obesity in low- and middle-income countries

2024Hashad, Reem; Lim, Sunghun; Abay, Kibrom A.

Global food value chains and obesity in low- and middle-income countries

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are experiencing disproportional increases in overweight or obesity rates. Parallel to this trend, many LMICs are witnessing significant growth in their participation in global food value chains (GFVCs). This paper aims to shed light on the public health implications of increasing participation in GFVCs. Leveraging macro- and micro-level data spanning 25 years, we study the relationship between countries’ participation in GFVCs and women’s overweight or obesity rates. We explore heterogeneous implications by disaggregating countries’ participation into backward and forward linkages in GFVCs, as well as across rural and urban areas. We find that temporal increases in countries’ participation in GFVCs are significantly associated with increasing overweight or obesity rates, primarily when countries participate in backward linkages and for urban populations. Participation in GFVCs involving forward linkages appears to have negligible implications, and the relationship between participation in GFVCs and obesity disappears for rural women. Furthermore, we find that an increase in countries’ participation in GFVCs is associated with an increase in consumption of energy-dense foods such as sugar, commonly linked with obesity. Our findings have important implications for informing public policies aimed at addressing the increasing obesity rates and associated economic and health burdens in LMICs. JEL Codes: F13, I10, Q17, Q18

Year published

2024

Authors

Hashad, Reem; Lim, Sunghun; Abay, Kibrom A.

Citation

Hashad, Reem; Lim, Sunghun; and Abay, Kibrom A. 2024. Global food value chains and obesity in low- and middle-income countries. Food Policy 127(August 2024): 102710. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2024.102710

Keywords

Body Mass Index; Food Supply Chains; Global Value Chains; Obesity; Overweight

Language

English

Access/Licence

Limited Access

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Journal Article

The 2024 Global Food Policy Report

Food systems and diets underpin many critical challenges to public health and environmental sustainability, including malnutrition, noncommunicable diseases, and climate change, but healthy diets have the unique potential to reshape the future for both human and planetary well-being. Drawing on recent evidence and experience, the 2024 Global Food Policy Report highlights opportunities for transforming food systems to ensure sustainable healthy diets for all.

Experts in Our Field

IFPRI’s experts work around the world to provide the evidence that supports effective policies to reduce poverty and end malnutrition.

600+

staff across the world

80+

countries where we work

#1

in the field of Agricultural Economics

20,000+

research outputs

Meet a Researcher

M Govindaraj is a Senior Scientist (Crop Development Specialist) in the HarvestPlus program of CGIAR. He manages the biofortification crop development research network and builds research capacities for biofortification mainstreaming, among other tasks in the HarvestPlus program of the CGIAR. He holds a Ph.D., in plant breeding and genetics from the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-India. His efforts and more than 14 years of experience in crop improvement have been instrumental in the public-private partnership on millet and R4D biofortification.…

Mahalingam Govindaraj

From our video channel

In this interview with RFD-TV, Purnima Menon, Senior Director, Food and Nutrition Policy, CGIAR and IFPRI, discusses what UNGA and Climate Week meetings mean for agriculture, and why it’s important for global leaders to prioritize agricultural innovation as they make decisions about how to address climate change and other global issues. She also highlights CGIAR’s scientific research benefits farmers both in the US and abroad.

Our Events

Making a Difference Blog Series

For more than three decades, IFPRI has worked with the Government of Ethiopia to provide evidence-based advice on the development of the country’s agricultural sector.

IFPRI’s research and policy recommendations led to the establishment of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in 2010, which continues to play a critical role in guiding the country’s agricultural development and sustainability.

Tamsin Zandstra, Gashaw T. Abate, Shahidur Rashid, and Nicholas Minot outline how IFPRI’s long-term strategic research support to the ATA has led to several tangible government policy outcomes.