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About IFPRI
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. Established in 1975, IFPRI currently has more than 500 employees working in over 50 countries. It is a research center of theCGIAR Consortium, a worldwide partnership engaged in agricultural research for development.
Vision and Mission
IFPRI’s vision is a world free of hunger and malnutrition. Its mission is to provide research-based policy solutions that sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition.
What We Do
Research at IFPRI focuses on six strategic areas:
- Ensuring Sustainable Food Production: IFPRI’s research analyzes options for policies, institutions, innovations, and technologies that can advance sustainable food production in a context of resource scarcity, threats to biodiversity, and climate change. READ MORE
- Promoting Healthy Food Systems: IFPRI examines how to improve diet quality and nutrition for the poor, focusing particularly on women and children, and works to create synergies among the three vital components of the food system: agriculture, health, and nutrition. READ MORE
- Improving Markets and Trade: IFPRI’s research focuses on strengthening markets and correcting market failures to enhance the benefits from market participation for small-scale farmers. READ MORE
- Transforming Agriculture: The aim of IFPRI’s research in this area is to improve development strategies to ensure broad-based rural growth and to accelerate the transformation from low-income, rural, agriculture-based economies to high-income, more urbanized, and industrial service-based ones. READ MORE
- Building Resilience: IFPRI’s research explores the causes and impacts of environmental, political, and economic shocks that can affect food security, nutrition, health, and well-being and evaluates interventions designed to enhance resilience at various levels. READ MORE
- Strengthening Institutions and Governance: IFPRI’s research on institutions centers on collective action in management of natural resources and farmer organizations. Its governance-focused research examines the political economy of agricultural policymaking, the degree of state capacity and political will required for achieving economic transformation, and the impacts of different governance arrangements.
Research on gender cuts across all six areas, because understanding the relationships between women and men can illuminate the pathway to sustainable and inclusive economic development.
IFPRI also leads two CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs): Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) andAgriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).
Beyond research, IFPRI’s work includes partnerships, communications, and capacity strengthening. The Institute collaborates with development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, farmers’ organizations, and other partners around the world.
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Resources
Displaying 1016 - 1020 of 1521Information and communication technologies for the poor
This brief is based on Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction: The Potential of Telecommunications, ed. Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Johns Hopkins University Press and IFPRI, 2006) "The variety of views about ICTs reveals that their role in development is unclear, especially without convincing evidence of their impact—and little research has been conducted on the direct and indirect links between ICTs and poverty reduction.
Water rights reform: lessons for institutional design
Internationally there is growing understanding that water rights are important and that a lack of effective water rights systems creates major problems for the management of increasingly scarce water supplies. However, discussion of water rights has often failed to recognize the range of available institutional options, the rich diversity of lessons from experience, and the need for appropriate flexibility in adapting institutional design to dynamic local conditions.
Farmers' rights and protection of traditional agricultural knowledge
"Although achieving in situ conservation is possible without changing farmers’ customary management of crops as common pool resources, an alternative approach is to negotiate a bioprospecting contract with providers of the resource that involves direct payment and royalties. This bioprospecting mechanism implies a change in the customary treatment of crop genetic resources as common pool goods and is in line with national ownership mandated by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Are there customary rights to plants?
Debates around Common Property Resources and Intellectual Property Rights fail to consider traditional and indigenous rights regimes that regulate plant resource exploitation, establish bundles of powers and obligations for heterogeneous groups of users, and create differential entitlements to benefits that are related to social structures. Such rights regimes are important to maintaining biodiversity and to human welfare; failing to recognize them presents dangers.
Improved water supply in the Ghanaian Volta Basin
We examine access to, use of, and participation in decisions on improved water supply in the Volta basin of Ghana, one of the first countries to introduce a community-based approach to rural water supply on a large scale. While 71 percent of the households interviewed have access to improved water, 43 percent of these continue to use unsafe sources as their main domestic water source. Our results indicate that quality perceptions and opportunity costs play an important role in households’ choice of water source.