Frontier analysis and agricultural typologies

PARI’s main goal is to contribute to sustainable agricultural growth and food security in Africa and India by supporting the scaling of proven innovations in the agri-food sector in collaboration with all relevant actors. PARI accompanies specified innovations with ex-ante impact research and identifies further innovation opportunities, including those expressed by end users of research in collaboration with the multi-stakeholder innovation platforms. Within PARI’s work, AGRODEP and IFPRI have the task of assisting in the development of a methodology and concept for strategic analysis and visioning by providing economic modelling tools to help understand where the best opportunities for innovation investments in value chains are. For this purpose, IFPRI has constructed agricultural typologies of microregions for 8 of the 12 African countries in PARI to identify micro-regional level opportunities, bottlenecks and investment gaps based on the concept of the production possibilities frontier applied to farm activities, drawing on highly detailed household-level survey and geospatial data on agroecological conditions, accessibility and poverty.