USAID has been a critical partner to IFPRI and its 2020 Vision Initiative, which seeks to promote a shared vision and consensus for action to meet the world’s food needs while reducing poverty and protecting the environment. USAID has sponsored four 2020 conferences—high-level global events that have featured USAID’s leadership in dialogues, debates, information sharing, and consensus building on key emerging issues affecting food and nutrition security.
The most recent conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—“Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security”—aimed to integrate resilience into the post-2015 agenda and collaborate on solutions to help smallholder farmers and the poor better cope with increasing shocks. According to an independent impact assessment, the agency’s participation in this 2020 conference helped enhance USAID’s resilience agenda. After the conference, USAID officials who attended the conference conducted an internal debriefing with its Resilience Leadership Team to discuss and incorporate what they learned, particularly the value of social capital as a component of resilience
