Overview
Agriculture provides crucial income and employment to rural communities worldwide. However, agricultural productivity is directly threatened by climate change, while food systems contribute to ecological degradation, including biodiversity loss, water table depletion and contamination, and soil degradation. These twin challenges highlight the urgent need for rural development policies and programs to help farmers bolster agricultural productivity while ensuring food systems’ sustainability and resilience.
Development Impact Group Rural has been working together with development partners to support rural development policies with urgently needed evidence on what works best to meet farmers’ challenges. Development Impact Group Rural sets up learning strategies and partnerships to inform the design of key classes of interventions. Through a process of iterative learning both within and across common interventions and investments, the program delivers a body of knowledge larger than the sum of its parts.
Development Impact Group Rural partners with governments and development partners worldwide on a portfolio of over 70 impact evaluations in 30 countries spanning Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
The recently launched Development Impact Group Rural Evidence Toolkit summarizes learning from over 15 years of Development Impact Group's work with large scale government investments combined with a deep review of the most recent and rigorous evidence. The Toolkit offers practitioners and policy makers practical guidance for designing rural development programs and policies with higher impacts and higher returns on investment
Themes
Development Impact Group Rural emphasizes two urgent research areas: promoting rural growth and prosperity and ensuring food systems’ sustainability and resilience. Within each research area, the Development Impact Group Rural program generates a rich body of evidence to support project design and guide policy recommendations.
Promoting Growth and Prosperity
Development Impact Group's research focuses on promoting widespread and sustained adoption of technologies and practices that enhance productivity, aid farmers in adapting to evolving climate and market stressors and ensure equitable gains from market integration. Development Impact Group’s studies show that:
effective extension systems tailored to farmers' learning methods and local conditions are pivotal for the rapid diffusion of productive and climate-smart technologies. Development Impact group research finds that decentralized opportunities for farmers to gain first-hand experience with the technology (Kondylis et al., 2023) effectively bolsters farmers' learning and interest.
subsidies, particularly electronic vouchers (eVouchers), offer a promising approach to boosting investments in modern inputs while mitigating fiscal constraints and market distortions. eVouchers enable self-targeting, promote self-experimentation, and facilitate local market promotion.
Substantial progress has been made in developing technologies and building infrastructure that are climate resilient, but complementary interventions are needed to make sure they deliver on their potential (Rwanda: Jones et al., 2022; Mozambique: Christian et al., 2022).
linking farmers to markets can foster a more robust food system and greater prosperity, particularly for smallholders. Strategies to address access to capital, information, certification, and fair prices are crucial for ensuring equitable market access.
Ensuring Sustainability and Resilience
Development Impact Group Rural’s work in sustainability and resilience addresses two critical questions: first, how can households be best supported to mitigate the impacts of shocks on their food security and bounce back during recovery? Second, how can productivity growth account for changing climate constraints and effectively manage natural resources?
Development Impact Group’s research shows that enhancing farmers' resilience to climate-related shocks is paramount, necessitating accelerated adoption of adaptive technologies and post-shock recovery support. For instance, in Nepal, rapid forecast triggered rapid cash transfers after floods improve immediate food security over a mor traditional response timeline. Development Impact Group collaborates with partners such as the World Food Programme to evaluate resilience programs' effectiveness in Mali, Niger, Rwanda, and South Sudan, using high-frequency data collection (Frankham, 2022).
Investing in climate-sensitive land uses can simultaneously promote adaptation, mitigate climate change, and support short-term food security. Development Impact Group's research emphasizes innovative approaches, such Payments for Ecosystems Services in Ghana (Legovini, 2018), aim for a triple-win scenario of improved livelihoods, environmental sustainability, and food security.
Partnerships
Development Impact Group partners with projects and country offices across the World Bank Group to ensure direct feedback loops into the policy dialogue, maximizing policy impact and encouraging the incremental building of new evidence. Through learning partnerships with key development partners, like the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP), UN agencies (FAO and UNICEF) and the World Food Programme's Office of Evaluation (WFP OEV), and the European Union, Development Impact Group Rural builds a coordinated agenda across contexts to build the evidence base in joint priority areas.
Within the bank Development Impact Group Rural is expanding its approach by collaborating with regional rollouts of two interconnected Food Security and Resilience Multi-Phased Approach (MPA) programs across at least 16 countries in Africa. This collaboration offers an opportunity to study coordinated interventions gradually across countries, with evidence from these efforts informing future program expansions.
