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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.

Ahmed Akhter

researcher spotlight

Akhter Ahmed

Akhter Ahmed is a Senior Research Fellow in the IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit and Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh. He has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and undernutrition in developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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

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experts

Markets, Trade, and Institutions

Alan de Brauw

Senior Research Fellow

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Bio

Alan de Brauw is a Senior Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit at IFPRI, and a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization. At IFPRI, he previously worked in the leadership of two CGIAR research programs and has managed several multi-country projects. Much of his research involves primary source data collection, and he has helped design, plan, and conduct multi-topic household surveys in 15 different countries in the developing world. His research agenda has focused on understanding both the impacts of agricultural interventions and the effects of migration on source households in rural areas of developing countries. His research has been published widely in development economics, agricultural economics, and nutrition journals and he recently co-authored a book on smallholders and agricultural value chains in Africa. Prior to joining IFPRI, Alan was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College. He has a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis.

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Publications

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Working Paper

Business aspects along the rural-urban continuum, outlet type, and gender of ownership among MSMEs in the Vietnamese food environment

2025Ceballos, Francisco; Aguilar, Francisco; de Brauw, Alan; Nguyen, Trang; van den Berg, Marrit
Details

Business aspects along the rural-urban continuum, outlet type, and gender of ownership among MSMEs in the Vietnamese food environment

Concurrent with its rapid economic growth, Viet Nam has been experiencing a food systems transformation. Broad changes in the food environment have been a key part of this transition. While the availability of processed food is ubiquitous, the food environment continues to be largely dominated by micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). So, to build strategies to improve the availability and affordability of healthy foods, MSMEs are a key entry point. In this paper, we use primary survey data to separate key sources of variation in MSMEs’ organizational dimensions and business practices by type of outlet, rural-urban location, and gender of the owners. We focus on outcomes related to employment, food sources, business finance, good business practices, and nutrition knowledge and attitudes. We find limited differences in this set of outcomes in terms of whether an outlet is located in a rural, peri-urban, or urban area, or in terms of the gender of its owners. Instead, most of the variation in outcomes can be linked to the type of outlet, raising specific types of outlets as a key focus when seeking to foster the supply of healthier foods in the food environment.

Year published

2025

Authors

Ceballos, Francisco; Aguilar, Francisco; de Brauw, Alan; Nguyen, Trang; van den Berg, Marrit

Citation

Ceballos, Francisco; Aguilar, Francisco; de Brauw, Alan; Nguyen, Trang; and van den Berg, Marrit. 2025. Business aspects along the rural-urban continuum, outlet type, and gender of ownership among MSMEs in the Vietnamese food environment. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2333. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/174099

Country/Region

Vietnam

Keywords

Asia; South-eastern Asia; Enterprises; Food Environment; Food Systems; Gender

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Sustainable Healthy Diets

Record type

Working Paper

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Journal Article

The unmet financial needs of intermediary firms within agri-food value chains in Uganda and Bangladesh

2025Adong, Annet; Ambler, Kate; Bloem, Jeffrey R.; de Brauw, Alan; Herskowitz, Sylvan; Islam, A.H.M. Saiful; Wagner, Julia
Details

The unmet financial needs of intermediary firms within agri-food value chains in Uganda and Bangladesh

JEL Codes: L14, L81, O13, Q13

Year published

2025

Authors

Adong, Annet; Ambler, Kate; Bloem, Jeffrey R.; de Brauw, Alan; Herskowitz, Sylvan; Islam, A.H.M. Saiful; Wagner, Julia

Citation

Adong, Annet; Ambler, Kate; Bloem, Jeffrey R.; de Brauw, Alan; Herskowitz, Sylvan; Islam, A.H.M. Saiful; and Wagner, Julia. 2025. The unmet financial needs of intermediary firms within agri-food value chains in Uganda and Bangladesh. Food Policy 132(April 2025): 102838. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102838

Country/Region

Uganda; Bangladesh

Keywords

Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Asia; Southern Asia; Agrifood Systems; Arabica Coffee; Potatoes; Rice; Soybeans; Value Chains; Capital Markets; Financial Inclusion

Language

English

Access/Licence

Limited Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102838 Source record

Project

Rethinking Food Markets

Record type

Journal Article

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Report

Cost effectiveness of anticipatory action: Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mozambique

2025de Brauw, Alan
Details

Cost effectiveness of anticipatory action: Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mozambique

An important question when conducting anticipatory action programs relates to its cost-effectiveness. By cost effectiveness, we refer to the relative costs and benefits of anticipatory action in general relative to a more standard approach to post-shock aid. In this context, we largely want to know what would happen to potential beneficiary households in two different scenarios: 1) if they receive anticipatory action transfers, and 2) if they instead receive unconditional post-shock transfers of the same size. The idea is that we assume there is a fixed budget envelope, and the same amount of assistance could be provided as either anticipatory action or as post-shock transfers. The resulting measurement estimates the difference in benefits and losses to providing anticipatory action relative to post-shock assistance, providing a conclusion on the overall net benefits or losses of this approach. Since we assume a fixed budget envelope, we invert the process of measuring cost effectiveness by measuring the net benefits of anticipatory action relative to post-shock transfers. This analysis uses the conceptual framework developed by de Brauw and Bloem (2024) to identify classes of potential benefits and costs for anticipatory action relative to unconditional post-shock transfers. The model suggests the main benefit to anticipatory action is that households can better protect their productive asset holdings, whether livestock or other farm implements, which implies their future incomes will be higher than they would be otherwise. There are also potential gains for households during the negative shock, implying those households may be less food insecure, for example, while the shock is occurring.1 On the other hand, the framework suggests that a specific cost to anticipatory action is the cost of getting it wrong (i.e., giving people benefits when the shock does not materialize for those people).

Year published

2025

Authors

de Brauw, Alan

Citation

De Brauw, Alan. 2025. Cost effectiveness of anticipatory action: Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mozambique. CGIAR Initiative on Fragility, Conflict, and Migration Technical Report. Montpellier: CGIAR System Organization. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/173370

Country/Region

Lesotho; Madagascar; Mozambique

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Eastern Africa; Cost Analysis; Shock; Assets; Income; Households

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Report

Blogs

Agrifood Value Chains are Complex Transaction-Linked Networks
IFPRI Blog
 | 
March 11, 2024

Agrifood Value Chains are Complex Transaction-Linked Networks

By Kate Ambler, Jeff Bloem, Alan de Brauw, and Julia Wagner

Why simplified linear approaches may fall short.

Bridging the smallholder finance gap: Collaborative research with WeGro in Bangladesh
IFPRI Blog
 | 
December 12, 2023

Bridging the smallholder finance gap: Collaborative research with WeGro in Bangladesh

By Kate Ambler, Mehrab Bakhtiar, Alan de Brauw, and Mohammad Riad Uddin

Helping farmers purchase and sell livestock.

Addressing the knowledge gap on the financial needs of firms in the midstream of agricultural value chains
IFPRI Blog
 | 
June 27, 2023

Addressing the knowledge gap on the financial needs of firms in the midstream of agricultural value chains

By Kate Ambler, Jeffrey R. Bloem, Alan de Brauw, and Sylvan Herskowitz

Shedding light on a key segment of the food system.

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Events

IFPRI @ CGIAR Science Week
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

April 7 to 12, 2025

IFPRI @ CGIAR Science Week

When humanity has faced its greatest challenges, science and innovation have provided solutions. Today, major and connected global challenges threaten the sustainability of food, land, and water systems, with the most vulnerable people and communities at greatest risk. Recognizing the urgency of these challenges, CGIAR and the Kenyan Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) are […]

No Time to Waste: Moving from Commitments to Action on Food Loss and Waste
IFPRI Policy Seminar

 | 

March 12, 2025, 9:30 – 11:00 am

No Time to Waste: Moving from Commitments to Action on Food Loss and Waste

Significant levels of food loss and waste continue to have negative impacts on food security and the environment, and Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, which aims to halve food loss and waste worldwide by 2030, remains out of reach. Join us on “12.3 Day” 2025 to take stock of efforts and opportunities to make progress toward […]

Learning Support for a Multi-Country Climate Resilience Programme for Food Security
IFPRI Policy Seminar

 | 

November 5, 2024, 9:00 – 10:30 am

Learning Support for a Multi-Country Climate Resilience Programme for Food Security

The Learning Support for a Sub-Saharan Africa Multi-Country Climate Resilience Program for Food Security, launched in 2023, aims to enhance food security and climate resilience across 14 African countries. This collaboration among CGIAR, the World Food Programme, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) has three pillars: scaling disaster risk financing, transforming food systems […]

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News

November 10, 2022 | In the News

New research initiative for healthy diets in Bangladesh (Dhaka Tribune) 

Poor-quality diets are associated with all forms of malnutrition-including undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity as well as around 1.1 million premature adult deaths each year. Dhaka Tribune reports on the launch of CGIAR’s Initiative on Sustainable Healthy Diets through Food Systems Transformation (SHiFT). This initiative will work closely with local, national, regional, and […]

November 20, 2019 | In the News

Food loss and waste and key to achieving SDG 2

Financial Nigeria published an article on how Nigeria is dealing with food loss and waste. An IFPRI report was quoted about food loss in developing countries. “Food loss during production, trade, and processing tends to outweigh food waste occurring at the retail and consumer stages of the supply chain.”

October 09, 2018 | In the News

Great Expectations from Ethiopia’s Wheat Initiative (Thomson Reuters Foundation News)

Thomson Reuters Foundation News published an op-ed by several IFPRI researchers including Gashaw Tadesse Abate, Tanguy Bernard, Alan de Brauw, and Nicholas Minot, who examined the impact of Ethiopia’s Wheat Initiative on farmers’ yields to understand how programs can boost wheat yields in underperforming areas. 

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