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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

Lilia Bliznashka

Lily Bliznashka is a Research Fellow in the Nutrition, Diets, and Health Unit. Her research focuses on assessing the effectiveness of multi-input nutrition-sensitive and nutrition-specific interventions and the mechanisms through which they work to improve maternal and child health and nutrition globally. She has worked in Burkina Faso, Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda.

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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

International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) promotes evidence-informed equitable, inclusive and sustainable development. 3ie supports the generation and effective use of high-quality evidence to inform decision-making and improve the lives of people living in poverty in low- and middle-income countries. 3ie provides guidance and support to produce, synthesize and quality assure evidence of what works, for whom, how, why, and at what cost.

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Projects

Picture-Based Crop Insurance (PBI)

Picture-Based Crop Insurance (PBI)

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Publications

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Working Paper

Livelihood alternatives to labor migration: A choice experiment in Tajikistan

2026Lambrecht, Isabel B.; Rajiv, Sharanya; De Block, Wouter; Ergasheva, Tanzila; Maertens, Miet; Mardonova, Mohru; Van Hoyweghen, Kaat
Details

Livelihood alternatives to labor migration: A choice experiment in Tajikistan

Labor migration is often driven by a need for income, and can also be motivated by a desire for higher earnings. A naïve assumption is therefore that an increase in local livelihood alternatives might reduce outmigration, something which has been found to hold true in some settings, but not in others. This study employs a discrete choice experiment (DCE) with 408 rural respondents in Tajikistan—a country heavily reliant on remittances from abroad—to assess whether specific local income-generating opportunities, such as those offered through cash-for-work programs or through the provision of additional farmland, might affect stated preferences regarding migration. The study explores trade-offs between local income generating opportunities (wage employment, access to farmland, and irrigation infrastructure) and migration restrictions, i.e., hypothetical constraints on household members migrating abroad for a given duration. We rely on stated rather than revealed preferences to examine these trade-offs. Our findings lend some support to the idea that households are willing to accept outmigration restrictions in return for improved local income-generation opportunities, either through wage employment or own-farming. Yet, findings are heterogeneous and depend on the households’ current and anticipated reliance on labor migration.

Year published

2026

Authors

Lambrecht, Isabel B.; Rajiv, Sharanya; De Block, Wouter; Ergasheva, Tanzila; Maertens, Miet; Mardonova, Mohru; Van Hoyweghen, Kaat

Citation

Lambrecht, Isabel B.; Rajiv, Sharanya; De Block, Wouter; Ergasheva, Tanzila; Maertens, Miet; Mardonova, Mohru; and Van Hoyweghen, Kaat. 2026. Livelihood alternatives to labor migration: A choice experiment in Tajikistan. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2412. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

Country/Region

Tajikistan

Keywords

Central Asia; Migration; Livelihoods; Land; Income Transfers; Remittances; Public Works

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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Working Paper

Vertical integration and the modernization of staple food value chains: Evidence from Myanmar’s rice sector

2026Goeb, Joseph; Minten, Bart; Reardon, Thomas; Zu, A Myint; Htar, May Thet
Details

Vertical integration and the modernization of staple food value chains: Evidence from Myanmar’s rice sector

Increased vertical integration and coordination are defining features of transforming and modernizing agricultural value chains in low- and middle-income countries, with important implications for market efficiency and farm-level transformation. However, research documenting these processes in modernizing domestic value chains is limited, and tends to focus on foreign direct investment and high-value food products. We study the rice value chain – the most important staple in Southeast Asia – in Myanmar and use unique data from domestic rice mills and farmers to analyze millers’ expansion into other businesses and services. We show that both modern and traditional mills serve as key nodes in local rice value chains, fulfilling diverse roles beyond processing at both the farm and post-farm levels and highlighting a co-development of modern processing and vertical integration. Yet, statistical tests that control for mill and farmer characteristics, respectively, show that modern mills are more engaged in vertical integration and coordination, particularly in post-farm value chain segments, highlighting the co-development of modern processing and business expansion. Consistent with this pattern in the miller data, farmers using a modern mill are more likely to receive complementary services – especially post-farm – and to adopt modern production practices more broadly. However, this expansion is uneven, reaching large farms more frequently than small and medium farms.

Year published

2026

Authors

Goeb, Joseph; Minten, Bart; Reardon, Thomas; Zu, A Myint; Htar, May Thet

Citation

Goeb, Joseph; Minten, Bart; Reardon, Thomas; Zu, A Myint; and Htar, May Thet. 2026. Vertical integration and the modernization of staple food value chains: Evidence from Myanmar’s rice sector. Myanmar SSP Working Paper 77. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/182623

Country/Region

Myanmar

Keywords

Asia; South-eastern Asia; Value Chains; Agricultural Value Chains; Rice; Agro-industrial Sector; Vertical Integration; Modernization; Milling

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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Working Paper

Creating a taro yield emulator and using it to study climate change impact on taro in Papua New Guinea

2026Braide, Tamunotonye M.; Thomas, Timothy S.; Robertson, Richard D.
Details

Creating a taro yield emulator and using it to study climate change impact on taro in Papua New Guinea

This paper develops a taro yield emulator to assess climate change impacts on taro production in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The emulator uses a fixed-effects polynomial regression trained on DSSAT simulations to capture non-linear, stage-specific responses of taro yields to rainfall and temperature. Historical MSWX weather and future climates from CMIP6/ISIMIP3b and a large MIT-IGSM/AgERA5 sample are used to drive the emulator and assess changes in average yields, yield variability, and the frequency of low-yield years across PNG. Our analysis shows that taro appears to be sensitive to both low- and high-rainfall levels during particular phases of growth and is sensitive to heat during particular phases, as well. Our visit to farmers fields in the Markham Valley along with discussions with experts at GrowPNG in Lae, NARI, and PNG University of Technology in Lae alerted us to the fact that drought was a serious problem for taro, but the model revealed the additional issues with high rainfall and high temperature, along with the additional information about the months that were particularly important for determining the degree of damage that adverse weather might do to yields. National-average yield changes by mid-century under high-emissions scenarios are projected to be small based on the median projections across climate models, however one of the climate models projects a much larger temperature increase relative to the other models, and for that climate model, the yield reduction is around 9% on average.

Year published

2026

Authors

Braide, Tamunotonye M.; Thomas, Timothy S.; Robertson, Richard D.

Citation

Braide, Tamunotonye M.; Thomas, Timothy S.; and Robertson, Richard D. 2026. Creating a taro yield emulator and using it to study climate change impact on taro in Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea Working Paper. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/182470

Country/Region

Papua New Guinea

Keywords

Oceania; Taro; Crop Yield; Climate Change; Impact; Climate Change Impacts; Crop Modelling; Fixed Costs; Regression Analysis

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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