Deadline: 7 October 2019
The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience (MRR Innovation Lab) is seeking Proposals for Research on Food Security and Resilience.
The research projects that support the mission to generate and transfer into action innovations that will bolster resilience, keeping rural individuals, households, communities and markets in positions of economic viability from which they can sustain and accelerate a path of inclusive agricultural growth.
Seed Grant Proposals: Seed grants are intended to allow researchers to determine the feasibility of an important and promising research idea, and to fully refine their ideas and strategies.
Priorities
- Enabling Resilient Escapes from Poverty: The enhancing material assets, social assets, psychological well-being or risk management can alter poverty dynamics. Illustrative examples include but are not limited to:
- Psychological dimensions of shocks and poverty and solutions that enable resilient escapes from poverty;
- The linkage between poverty and resilience in conflict zones and/or areas of recurrent crisis;
- The synergies between building assets and securing assets with risk reduction mechanisms;
- Interactions between psychological and material assets and learn to effectively harness their synergies; and
- Breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty through interventions that allow households to protect the human capacities of their children.
- Financial and Agronomic Innovations for Inclusive Growth and Resilience: Research brought forward a series of index insurance innovations that can promote Resilience-Plus. Illustrative examples include but are not limited to:
- Better models of crop identification and predictions of crop yields and losses for use in the design of high-quality agricultural index insurance;
- Price or revenue insurance;
- Using insurance to unlock credit for smallholder farmers;
- Improve the salience and availability of index insurance for women farmers;
- Innovation and evaluation of a set of flexible financial instruments that blend indexed savings, credit and insurance contracts;
- Develop and test instruments for managing idiosyncratic risks (especially those risks that weigh heavily against women’s assets); and
- Explore the complementarities between on and off-farm livelihood activities, as well as financial and agronomic risk management technologies including stress tolerant seed varieties and techniques and investments in soil and water management.
- Resilient Systems for Broadly-based Agricultural Growth: Prior research makes clear the power of relaxing system-level constraints, and yet they also know that market and other social systems can bypass men and women in vulnerable phases of their life cycle. Finding ways to supersede these tradeoffs and create systems that are competitive and inclusive is warranted. Illustrative examples include but are not limited to:
- Tapping into social networks to resolve systemic information problems (without deepening existing disadvantages with regard to inclusiveness);
- Design and targeting of learning subsidies so that they do not bypass women and their networks;
- Using IT solutions, farmer groups and contract farming mechanisms to encourage smallholder commercialization by creating more competitive markets for smallscale farmers that offer them better prices for inputs and outputs and better-quality inputs; and
- Stabilizing public finance, perhaps through risk facilities that integrate sovereign and individual risk, to make it more effective in stabilizing markets and communities.
Funding Information
- Maximum request amount: $750,000
- Maximum request for seed grants and feasibility studies: $40,000
Eligibility Criteria
Each proposal must identify at least one PI from a US-based university and one from a hostcountry institution. The MRR Innovation Lab will subcontract with the PI from the lead US university. This PI and his/her university will be responsible for negotiating and entering into sub agreements with all partner institutions and accounting to the MRR Innovation Lab for all program accomplishments, expenditures and reporting requirements. If for some reason this is not feasible or appropriate, please contact the MRR Innovation Lab to discuss whether an exception to this requirement is allowable.
How to Apply
Interested applicants can apply via given website.
For more information, please visit https://basis.ucdavis.edu/news/mrr-innovation-lab-2019-call-proposals-research-food-security-and-resilience