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With research staff from more than 70 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

researcher spotlight

Danielle Resnick

Danielle Resnick is a Senior Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Unit and a Non-Resident Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution. Her research focuses on the political economy of agricultural policy and food systems, governance, and democratization, drawing on extensive fieldwork and policy engagement across Africa and South Asia.

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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 480 employees working in over 70 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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partnerships

The CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH), led by IFPRI, is dedicated to improving agriculture development and nutrition among the global poor. A4NH helps realize the potential of agricultural development to deliver gender-equitable health and nutritional benefits to the poor. A4NH was created to help ensure that agricultural practices, interventions, and policies will maximize health and nutrition benefits, while also reducing health risks.

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Projects

Nudging for Good: A.I.-driven diagnostics and behavior change to improve diets and nutrition

Nudging for Good: A.I.-driven diagnostics and behavior change to improve diets and nutrition

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Operational Research for WFP’s Food assistance for Assets (FFA) Program in Sri Lanka

Operational Research for WFP’s Food assistance for Assets (FFA) Program in Sri Lanka

Background: The World Food Programme (WFP) and IFPRI have been collaborating for several years to increase the impacts of WFP’s programs on diet, nutrition and……

Applying New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment (ANEW)

Applying New Evidence for Women’s Empowerment (ANEW)

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Publications

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Working Paper

Unpacking the political economy of fertilizer subsidy reforms

2025Chugh, Aditi; Resnick, Danielle
Details

Unpacking the political economy of fertilizer subsidy reforms

Global calls to repurpose agricultural support toward more sustainable and equitable food systems have intensified scrutiny of fertilizer subsidies. While political economy constraints often hinder reform, the exact manifestation of these constraints is rarely examined. To clarify the specific mechanisms at play, this paper systematically reviews peer-reviewed studies from 2000 to 2025 and identifies 38 fertilizer subsidy reform cases across 15 countries. We code political economy factors influencing outcomes at different stages of subsidy adoption and redesign. The analysis shows that ideational factors around self-sufficiency, the private sector, and the social contract, as well as the institutional structures impacting policymaking, are central to successful subsidy introduction. Electoral incentives play a role at both the policy introduction and redesign phases. Yet, political economy factors are not the only prominent drivers. In fact, technocratic considerations about underperformance or corruption became more prominent during redesign efforts but were also present in more than 80 percent of failed cases. This reaffirms that while technocratic factors, including the availability of research and evidence are necessary for subsidy design improvements, they are not sufficient on their own. By distinguishing which political economy factors matter and how they interact with broader policy process dynamics, this study provides a more actionable foundation for anticipating and managing challenges to fertilizer subsidy reforms and repurposing more broadly.

Year published

2025

Authors

Chugh, Aditi; Resnick, Danielle

Citation

Chugh, Aditi; and Resnick, Danielle. 2025. Unpacking the political economy of fertilizer subsidy reforms. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2397. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/180322

Keywords

Fertilizers; Subsidies; Reforms; Policies; Political Ecology

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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Working Paper

Effects of brick kiln industry on agricultural productivity: A natural experiment in Bangladesh

2025Mahzab, Moogdho; Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Mattsson, Martin; Anowar, Md Sadat
Details

Effects of brick kiln industry on agricultural productivity: A natural experiment in Bangladesh

Agriculture remains central to Bangladesh’s economy and food security, yet it is increasingly threatened by the rapid expansion of informal brick manufacturing that extracts fertile topsoil from cropland and generates heavy local pollution. This paper provides national-scale causal evidence on how brick kiln expansion affects vegetation health and agricultural productivity by combining long-run satellite observations with geolocated kiln data. We construct a spatiotemporal panel of unions and municipalities using annual the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer normalized difference vegetation index (MODIS NDVI) from 2002–2024 and a high-resolution inventory of 9,187 brick kilns detected through satellite imagery and machine learning. Using a continuous and staggered difference-in-differences design, we find no evidence of differential pre-trends, but we do find a clear and persistent deterioration in vegetation health following kiln establishment. The magnitude is economically meaningful: a marginal increase in kiln presence is associated with roughly a 1 percent annual decline in local vegetation productivity, with effects that persist and accumulate over time. These results are consistent with long-run soil degradation and chronic environmental exposure around kiln sites, and they imply substantial hidden costs of informal industrial growth in densely cultivated landscapes. The findings highlight the urgency of stronger enforcement of siting rules, of incentives for cleaner production technologies, and of land-use planning that protects high-productivity agricultural zones.

Year published

2025

Authors

Mahzab, Moogdho; Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Mattsson, Martin; Anowar, Md Sadat

Citation

Mahzab, Moogdho; Bakhtiar, M. Mehrab; Mattsson, Martin; and Anowar, Md Sadat. 2025. Effects of brick kiln industry on agricultural productivity: A natural experiment in Bangladesh. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2402. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/180697

Country/Region

Bangladesh

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agricultural Productivity; Food Security; Plant Health; Remote Sensing; Drying Kilns

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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Working Paper

Women’s empowerment and conflict in Burkina Faso: Learning from a randomized trial and non-random conflict

2025Heckert, Jessica; Sow, Doulo; Tranchant, Jean-Pierre; Paz, Florencia; Gelli, Aulo
Details

Women’s empowerment and conflict in Burkina Faso: Learning from a randomized trial and non-random conflict

Armed conflict has myriad negative consequences on the wellbeing of women and men, and its non-random nature makes it difficult to study its impacts. We examine the changes in empowerment during the period of 2017-2020 in western Burkina Faso as armed conflict moved closer. We combined data from the randomized-controlled trial of Soutenir l’Exploitation Familiale pour Lancer l’Elevage des Volailles et Valoriser l’Economie Rural (SELEVER) a gender- and nutrition-sensitive poultry production intervention, which collected the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index with geospatial- and date-specific data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project database. To evaluate the effect of conflict on empowerment, we estimated a continuous difference-in-difference model, separately for women and men, across multiple empowerment indicators, in which the primary explanatory variable describes the change in distance to conflict during this time period. Then, to determine if the SELEVER program had a protective effect when there was increased proximity to conflict, we estimated these models separately for the treatment and control groups and compare the difference in the coefficients. As conflict encroached, there was a shift in intrahousehold decision making that suggests less coordination between spouses and fewer decisions made jointly, along with a greater acceptance of intimate partner violence among women. We also found increases in other outcomes, such as men’s group membership, and women’s and men’s access to credit. These changes may be attributable to how communities responded and how humanitarian aid was delivered. We found that the SELEVER program had a protective effect on men’s work balance and the amount of time that both women and men spent working. Notably, however, women spent more time on childcare activities as conflict become closer.

Year published

2025

Authors

Heckert, Jessica; Sow, Doulo; Tranchant, Jean-Pierre; Paz, Florencia; Gelli, Aulo

Citation

Heckert, Jessica; Sow, Doulo; Tranchant, Jean-Pierre; Paz, Florencia; and Gelli, Aulo. 2025. Women’s empowerment and conflict in Burkina Faso: Learning from a randomized trial and non-random conflict. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2403. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/180989

Country/Region

Burkina Faso

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Western Africa; Gender; Women’s Empowerment; Conflicts; Randomized Controlled Trials; Fragility

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Fragility, Conflict, and Migration

Record type

Working Paper

Events

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Reflections from a Career in Research for Development
IFPRI Policy Seminar

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November 22, 2021, 9:30 – 11:00 am

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Reflections from a Career in Research for Development

Virtual Event: Nov 22, 2021 – 09:30 AM to 11:00 AM EST. This special event will present experiences and insights gained over four decades of research, including reflections on academia and development in Africa. 

Food systems lessons from COVID-19: From understanding fragilities to building resilience
IFPRI Policy Seminar

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March 2, 2021, 9:30 – 11:00 am

Food systems lessons from COVID-19: From understanding fragilities to building resilience

COVID-19’s impacts on our global food system have affected the food security and nutritional wellbeing of millions of people worldwide, with market closures, supply disruptions, and income and employment losses. Understanding the extent and nature of these impacts will be critical to building resilience to future shocks. At this seminar, researchers from the CGIAR COVID-19 Hub […]

Virtual Event - COVID-19’s Short-term Impacts on Economies, Food Systems and Poverty in African and Asian Countries: Economywide Estimates from Economywide Models
IFPRI Policy Seminar

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August 11, 2020, 9:30 – 10:45 am

Virtual Event – COVID-19’s Short-term Impacts on Economies, Food Systems and Poverty in African and Asian Countries: Economywide Estimates from Economywide Models

Using economywide models, presenters discuss the varied effects of different policies and economic structures on food systems and poverty during COVID-19 in Nigeria, Myanmar, and Sudan.
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Blogs

World Food Safety Day 2024: Empowering consumers and small businesses with information
Research Post
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June 06, 2024

World Food Safety Day 2024: Empowering consumers and small businesses with information

By Vivian Hoffmann

Targeting interventions to benefit public health.

Adapt, assess, progress: Integrating measures of women’s empowerment into rural development projects
Research Post
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May 13, 2024

Adapt, assess, progress: Integrating measures of women’s empowerment into rural development projects

By Carlo Azzarri, Sedi-Anne Boukaka, Jessica Heckert, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Greg Seymour, and Sara Savastano

A new tool developed by IFPRI and IFAD.

Introducing the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)
Research Post
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October 13, 2023

Introducing the Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)

By Emily Myers, Jessica Heckert, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Hazel Malapit, Greg Seymour, and Agnes Quisumbing

A new tool to address the gender data gap in agricultural development.

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