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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.

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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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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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TOPIC

Risk and Insurance

Farming can be a risky endeavor. While farmers in developed countries have access to a range of financial instruments—including credit and insurance—to manage agricultural risks, many farmers in developing countries, and especially women and other marginalized groups, cannot fall back on these safety nets. For them, risk is one of the main barriers to expanding investments in agriculture.

IFPRI’s research aims to improve the availability, affordability, and quality of financial instruments designed to reduce the risk of agricultural investments, such as agricultural insurance, risk-contingent credit, or mobile banking systems that improve the functioning of informal insurance. This includes improving product design through use of digital technologies, bundling with risk-reducing agricultural technologies and practices and agro-advisories, and conducting rigorous impact evaluations of the cost-effectiveness of these innovations in enhancing resilience. A major focus of this research is on assessing how to make these financial instruments more gender responsive.

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This research, implemented together with partners, has led to the emergence of innovative products tailored to the local needs of both farmers and bankers and insurers, such as picture-based crop insurance and remote-sensing enabled risk-contingent credit.IFPRI’s research on risk and insurance is closely aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 1, SDG 2, and SDG 10, and the CGIAR Impact Areas on Poverty Reduction, Livelihoods, and Jobs and Gender Equality, Youth, and Social Inclusion.

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topics

Publications

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Working Paper

See it grow: A randomized evaluation of a digital innovation to improve crop insurance contract design

2025Kramer, Berber; Cecchi, Francesco; Levine, Madison; Waithaka, Lilian
Details

See it grow: A randomized evaluation of a digital innovation to improve crop insurance contract design

Insurance has great potential to increase productive investments, but agricultural insurance markets remain thin, in part because asymmetric information limits the viability of indemnity-based contracts. This paper evaluates a digital innovation—picture-based insurance (PBI)—that uses smartphone images of insured crops to indemnify crop damage. Through a cluster randomized trial in seven counties in Kenya, we compare subsidized PBI to subsidized weather index-based insurance (WBI) and to a control group offered unsubsidized WBI. We find that moving from index-based to indemnity-based insurance substantially increases take-up, particularly among women and farmers in drought-prone areas, indicating that innovations in contract design can broaden coverage in inclusive ways. Insurance coverage significantly increases fertilizer use in both treatments, confirming that uninsured risk constrains agricultural investment. However, despite higher take-up, PBI increases total fertilizer use as much as WBI. Using a Heckman selection model to correct for endogenous adoption, we show that this is not only due to incentive effects but also to multidimensional selection: PBI attracts farmers who, in the absence of insurance, would have invested less in fertilizer. After adjusting for this compositional change, differences in fertilizer use per farmer enrolled in WBI and PBI are not statistically significant. We conclude that higher take-up rates of digital indemnity-based insurance may not automatically translate into proportionally larger farm investments, but since increased coverage is concentrated among the relatively more vulnerable, it may contribute to complementary objectives such as inclusivity, equity, and resilience. Contract design and targeting, therefore, remain central to effective insurance product development.

Year published

2025

Authors

Kramer, Berber; Cecchi, Francesco; Levine, Madison; Waithaka, Lilian

Citation

Kramer, Berber; Cecchi, Francesco; Levine, Madison; and Waithaka, Lilian. 2025. See it grow: A randomized evaluation of a digital innovation to improve crop insurance contract design. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2396. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/179846

Country/Region

Kenya

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Eastern Africa; Digital Innovation; Crop Insurance; Agricultural Insurance; Insurance; Technology Adoption; Risk; Information

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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Working Paper

Climate risks and agricultural changes in conflict-affected Myanmar

2025Minten, Bart; van Asselt, Joanna; Aung, Zin Wai; Goeb, Joseph
Details

Climate risks and agricultural changes in conflict-affected Myanmar

Climate change and conflict are increasingly shaping livelihoods in Myanmar, with agricultural households among the most directly affected. Yet, empirical evidence on how these stressors affect farmers’ adaptation strategies and agricultural assets remains limited. We draw on unique largescale primary surveys: Over a three-year period, we conducted bi-annual surveys with nearly 5,000 farmers, collecting data on exposure to conflict, natural risks, climate change perceptions, agricultural adaptation, and agricultural land valuation.

Year published

2025

Authors

Minten, Bart; van Asselt, Joanna; Aung, Zin Wai; Goeb, Joseph

Citation

Minten, Bart; van Asselt, Joanna; Aung, Zin Wai; and Goeb, Joseph. 2025. Climate risks and agricultural changes in conflict-affected Myanmar. Myanmar SSP Working Paper 72. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/178197

Country/Region

Myanmar

Keywords

Asia; South-eastern Asia; Climate Change; Risk; Conflicts; Climate-smart Agriculture; Agriculture

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

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Opinion Piece

Smartphones, women’s rights and coupons: New trends that can boost insurance for African farmers

2025Kramer, Berber; Hill, Ruth Vargas
Details

Smartphones, women’s rights and coupons: New trends that can boost insurance for African farmers

This piece on “The Conversation” highlights how emerging innovations in technology, product design and gender inclusion can expand access to agricultural insurance for smallholder farmers across Africa. As climate change intensifies droughts, floods and other weather extremes, smallholders remain highly exposed, yet traditional insurance models have struggled to reach them due to high costs, limited trust and administrative challenges. The authors discuss how smartphone-based photo verification can simplify loss assessment, how insurance “coupons” can make premiums more affordable at the point of purchase, and how strengthening women’s rights and decision-making power can increase both uptake and the equitable distribution of benefits. They also underscore the value of complementing formal insurance with existing informal risk-sharing networks. Together, these innovations can lower barriers to participation, reduce basis risk, and create more inclusive insurance markets, which will help scale climate-risk protection across the continent.

Year published

2025

Authors

Kramer, Berber; Hill, Ruth Vargas

Citation

Kramer, Berber; and Hill, Ruth Vargas. 2025. Smartphones, women’s rights and coupons: New trends that can boost insurance for African farmers. The Conversation. Published on November 11, 2025. https://doi.org/10.64628/AAJ.6wkxs9tng

Keywords

Crop Insurance; Climate Resilience; Policies; Agriculture; Risk Transfer; Extreme Weather Events; Livelihoods; Food Security; Mobile Phones

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.64628/aaj.6wkxs9tng Source record

Record type

Opinion Piece

Blogs

From satellite images to real-world impact: How IFPRI-Dvara collaboration opened new doors for Odisha’s marginalized farmers
Research Post
 | 
December 17, 2025

From satellite images to real-world impact: How IFPRI-Dvara collaboration opened new doors for Odisha’s marginalized farmers

By Berber Kramer and Shalini Roy

Turning crisis into opportunity.

Building smallholder farmers’ resilience through index insurance in Kenya
Research Post
 | 
December 05, 2025

Building smallholder farmers’ resilience through index insurance in Kenya

By Anne G. Timu, Kennedy Anahinga, Eileen Bureza, and Liangzhi You

Expanding the reach and effectiveness of a key government program.

IFPRI and causal impact evaluation: Evidence for real-life policies
Research Post
 | 
September 25, 2025

IFPRI and causal impact evaluation: Evidence for real-life policies

By Alan de Brauw

A new report outlines diverse applications.

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Events

Innovations in agricultural insurance: Lessons learnt about managing smallholder farmer risks
IFPRI Program/Country Event

 | 

October 26, 2021, 11:00 – 12:00 pm

Innovations in agricultural insurance: Lessons learnt about managing smallholder farmer risks

Virtual Event: OCT 26, 2021 – 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT. This webinar will present an evaluation of how action oriented research on tools for improving smallholder farmers have spawned further interest by different sector actors. 

Challenges and Opportunities for Latin American Agriculture
IFPRI at External Event

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October 10 to 11, 2019

Challenges and Opportunities for Latin American Agriculture

IFPRI is participating in an international seminar on Challenges and Opportunities for Agriculture in Latin America, which will be held on October 10th and 11th, 2019 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This international seminar will discuss the difficulties and prospects for agriculture in Latin America, a region that currently accounts for a quarter of total exports […]

The 5th Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture 2019
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

October 8 to 10, 2019

The 5th Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture 2019

IFPRI is participating in the 5th Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), which will be held from October 8-10, 2019. Since the term climate-smart agriculture (CSA) was coined in 2010, the biannual global science conferences on CSA have emerged as the key global forum for scientific exchange to underpin CSA implementation.  The conference will […]

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News

November 11, 2025 | In the News

Smartphones, women’s rights and coupons: new trends that can boost insurance for African farmers (The Conversation)

IFPRI’s Berber Kramer and Ruth Hill discuss how new, innovative forms of insurance could help insure farmers against weather shocks, and how South Africa’s G20 presidency can support these initiatives.

February 02, 2023 | In the News

A digital push for agri but with less funds (Live Mint) 

A new digital infrastructure for farmers and an accelerator fund to encourage startups were among the major announcements in India’s latest budget, writes Live Mint in a story. The digital public infrastructure for agriculture will be built as an open-source public good that will enable farmer-centric solutions. The proposed digital agri-stack will aid farmers with […]

November 20, 2022 | In the News

Policy paper on agricultural insurance on works (Kenya News Agency) 

Kenya News Agency reports on the recent workshop on innovation in Agricultural Risk Management in Kenya, quoting Peter Owoko, the Director of Agriculture Policy Research and Regulations at the Ministry of Agriculture, who underscored the need for innovations in product development and distribution. In the last three years, several Kenyan and international organizations have been […]

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Our experts

David Spielman

David Spielman

Director, Innovation Policy and Scaling (IPS), Innovation
Policy and Scaling

Francisco Ceballos

Francisco Ceballos

Research Fellow, Markets,
Trade, and Institutions, Latin America and the Caribbean

Berber Kramer

Berber Kramer

Senior Research Fellow, Markets,
Trade, and Institutions

Liangzhi You

Liangzhi You

Senior Research Fellow, Foresight
and Policy Modeling