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Timothy Thomas

Timothy Thomas is a Senior Research Fellow in the Foresight and Policy Modeling Unit. His research focuses on the impact of climate change on agricultural productivity. Tim’s work involves developing innovative methods for simulated climate futures and model coordination between climate, crop, water, energy, and economics.

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Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion

Md Sadat Anowar

Research Analyst

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Bio

Md. Sadat Anowar is a Research Analyst in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, based in Bangladesh, where he analyzes survey data and prepares research reports and policy briefs for large-scale household surveys. He joined IFPRI in 2019 under the Bangladesh Policy Research and Strategy Support Program (PRSSP). His research interests include agriculture, social protection policies, and sustainable development.

Before joining IFPRI, he was a research associate at think tanks, including the South Asian Network on Economic Modeling and the Institute for Policy, Advocacy, and Governance. He also worked with the Aga Khan Foundation and the Centre for Policy Dialogue in Bangladesh.

Sadat received his bachelor and master of social sciences degrees in economics from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Languages spoken: Bangla, English

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Publications

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Brief

Modernizing Bangladesh's social protection system: Priorities for greater effectiveness, inclusion, and resilience

2026Ahmed, Akhter; Anowar, Md Sadat
Details

Modernizing Bangladesh's social protection system: Priorities for greater effectiveness, inclusion, and resilience

Bangladesh has made substantial progress in reducing poverty and improving human development, with social protection playing an important role in protecting vulnerable households and strengthening human capital. The Government has demonstrated a strong commitment to social protection, particularly through the adoption of the National Social Security Strategy (NSSS) in 2015 and subsequent efforts to streamline and consolidate programs. Despite this progress, the social protection system faces significant challenges. It remains fragmented across numerous programs and ministries; targeting errors continue to exclude many vulnerable households while including others with less need; and benefit levels are often insufficient to provide meaningful protection against poverty, vulnerability, and shocks. A substantial share of social protection spending is also allocated to programs that do not primarily benefit the poor, while many vulnerable households remain inadequately covered. Addressing these gaps is becoming increasingly important as Bangladesh confronts rising living costs, slower economic growth, widening inequalities, and more frequent economic and climate-related shocks. Bangladesh now has an opportunity to modernize its social protection system around a more coherent, lifecycle- and vulnerability-based framework. Social protection should move beyond a narrow focus on poverty reduction to address risks and vulnerabilities across the lifecycle— including maternal and early childhood needs; nutritional and educational deprivation among school-age children; employment risks during the working years; disability; and income insecurity in old age. Investments in early childhood, particularly during the first 1,000 days of life, can yield substantial long-term benefits for nutrition, health, learning, and productivity. The system should respond more effectively to rising inequality, urban vulnerability, population ageing, and health-related shocks. This will require strengthening social assistance while progressively developing complementary social insurance mechanisms, including unemployment protection, employment injury insurance, maternity benefits, health protection, and contributory pension schemes. Overall, Bangladesh’s next phase of social protection reform should focus not simply on spending more, but on spending smarter—building a coherent, inclusive, adequate, life-cycle-oriented, and shock-responsive system that protects households from both persistent poverty and emerging vulnerabilities.

Year published

2026

Authors

Ahmed, Akhter; Anowar, Md Sadat

Citation

Ahmed, Akhter; and Anowar, Md Sadat. 2026. Modernizing Bangladesh's social protection system: Priorities for greater effectiveness, inclusion, and resilience. IFPRI Policy Note. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/183784

Country/Region

Bangladesh

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Social Protection; Modernization; Policies; Public Expenditure; Targeting

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

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Brief

Women’s voice and agency in “organized” vegetable clusters: The Agriculture Production Cluster (APC) program in Odisha, India

2026Narayanan, Sudha; Belton, Ben; Mishra, Bhumika; Anowar, Md Sadat
Details

Women’s voice and agency in “organized” vegetable clusters: The Agriculture Production Cluster (APC) program in Odisha, India

A key policy tool for inclusive agrifood system transformation has been organizing women farmers into collectives. This is especially important for diversifying production into high-value sectors such as horticulture and livestock. Empirical evidence from around the world shows that some of these efforts can be transformative, but the impact is mixed and can involve tradeoffs (Malhotra et al. 2024; Quisumbing et al. 2021; Twyman et al. 2022). The extent to which programmatic interventions can enable inclusive and sustainable value chain participation thus depends on specific design principles. These includes the selection of commodities, bundling of interventions that tackle multiple constraints simultaneously, the presence of committed staff and champions for effective implementation, and a pathway to institutionalize these interventions (Narayanan et al. 2024, for example). In contrast to clusters that develop spontaneously, where incentives and supportive institutions may be present already and may have spawned these clusters to start with, the viability of organized clusters depends crucially on these inputs. In this note, we bring together qualitative and quantitative data from a larger research effort (See Project Note 1) to spotlight the experiences of women farmers in organized clusters in the Indian state of Odisha. We focus on the Agriculture Production Cluster Program (APC). The goals of our research are to understand how organized clusters can foster and support diversification into vegetable cultivation. A second goal is to understand women’s experience in vegetable production within these clusters. A third goal is to reflect on the broader design and implementation of the APC program and its sustainability in a context where many cluster interventions are known to implode or fade after the program ends (Belton et al. 2025; Narayanan et al. 2025).

Year published

2026

Authors

Narayanan, Sudha; Belton, Ben; Mishra, Bhumika; Anowar, Md Sadat

Citation

Narayanan, Sudha; Belton, Ben; Mishra, Bhumika; and Anowar, Md Sadat. 2026. Women’s voice and agency in “organized” vegetable clusters: The Agriculture Production Cluster (APC) program in Odisha, India. INCATA Project Note 9. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/181788

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Gender; Women; Women's Empowerment; Women Farmers; Vegetables; Agricultural Production

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

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Brief

How are the production practices of vegetable farmers in Odisha transforming?

2026Belton, Ben; Narayanan, Sudha; Anowar, Md Sadat; Khan, Asrual; Islam, Mir Raihanul
Details

How are the production practices of vegetable farmers in Odisha transforming?

Agricultural transformation and smallholder commercialization are accompanied and driven by deepening integration of farmers into input markets and associated technological change. This project note examines two related questions: (1) How do households enter commercial vegetable cultivation? (2) How have technologies used to produce vegetables changed over time? The following key findings stand out: Vegetable farming in Odisha is a long-standing activity. Most farmers entered vegetable cultivation over 20 years ago, with expansion accelerating 20–30 years back as markets deepened. Fewer than one in five respondents are first-generation vegetable farmers. Entry into vegetable farming is primarily self-financed. Over 80% of farmers required startup capital to purchase inputs or make plot modifications such as land levelling. These investments were funded mainly through agricultural earnings, migration income, or non-farm earnings. Self-help groups are also an important source of finance for these investments. Subsistence coexists with commercialization. Most farmers were partly motivated to start producing vegetables for home consumption, but virtually all sell some of what they produce. Marketed surpluses of vegetables have risen gradually, to reach over 70% by 2025, without displacing household self-provisioning, and own production accounts for around half of farmers’ vegetable consumption. Crop portfolios are both concentrated and diverse. Production is dominated by a small set of “commodity vegetables” (most importantly tomato and brinjal), alongside a wide array of niche crops grown by smaller numbers of farmers. Recent contraction in crop diversity and off-season production signals rising climate stress. The share of household growing vegetables in multiple seasons, and the number of crops produced per farm has fallen slightly, consistent with increasing climate stress and perhaps reflecting competitive pressures from out of state vegetable producers. Adoption of productivity enhancing agricultural technologies is at a transitional stage. Hybrid vegetable seed, inorganic fertilizers, pesticides, and mechanized land preparation are widely adopted, but adoption of more advanced technologies that could give rise to greater commoditization (e.g. seed trays, seedlings purchased from nurseries, plastic mulch, drip irrigation, drones) remains low. Adoption of environmentally friendly inputs such as vermicompost, organic pesticides, and insect traps is limited. Technology adoption is shaped by clustering and scale. Uptake of inputs, mechanization, and post-harvest handling tends to be greater in areas with high concentrations of vegetable production and among larger farms, reflecting agglomeration effects and access to service markets. Expansion of irrigation access has been a critical catalyst for smallholder vegetable commercialization. The number of irrigated parcels of land operated by surveyed households has grown 74 percent since 1980, with irrigation accelerating sharply after 2010. Improving access to irrigation post-2010 has spurred entry into vegetable cultivation and simultaneous adoption of a complementary bundle of productivity enhancing technologies. Vegetable cultivation relies heavily on private investments in irrigation, particularly open wells and borewells. Government irrigation schemes have been targeted primarily toward rice. Although more than half of irrigated parcels of land are served by government irrigation and the number of parcels with access to government irrigation has grown 35 percent in the past 15 years, the expansion of private irrigation provision has been almost twice as fast, growing 67 percent in the same period.

Year published

2026

Authors

Belton, Ben; Narayanan, Sudha; Anowar, Md Sadat; Khan, Asrual; Islam, Mir Raihanul

Citation

Belton, Ben; Narayanan, Sudha; Anowar, Md Sadat; Khan, Asrual; and Islam, Mir Raihanul. 2026. How are the production practices of vegetable farmers in Odisha transforming? INCATA Project Note 4. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/181760

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agricultural Production; Vegetables; Farmers; Agricultural Transformation; Smallholders

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

Blogs

Reducing food loss and waste for climate outcomes: Insights from national consultations in Bangladesh, Malawi and Nepal
Issue Post
 | 
August 21, 2024

Reducing food loss and waste for climate outcomes: Insights from national consultations in Bangladesh, Malawi and Nepal

By Suresh Babu, Yogendra Karki, Innocent Pangapanga, Md Sadat Anowar, and Nandita Srivastava

Integrating key goals of food system transformation.

Events

World Food Prize 2024 Borlaug International Dialogue: Side Event on
IFPRI at External Event

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October 22, 2024, 8:30 – 10:00 am

World Food Prize 2024 Borlaug International Dialogue: Side Event on “Reducing the Impact of GHGs Through Managing Food Loss and Waste (FLW): Insights from Bangladesh, Guatemala, Malawi, and Nepal”

October 22, 2024 8:30 – 10:00 am (CDT) 9:30 – 11:00 am (EDT) Register IFPRI is participating in the 2024 Norman E. Borlaug International Dialogue. This year’s theme, “Seeds of Opportunity: Bridging Generations and Cultivating Diplomacy”, will emphasizes the vital role of integrating past wisdom, current innovations and the pressing needs of tomorrow, by leveraging […]