HarvestChoice

HarvestChoice is another cutting-edge  program  co-led by IFPRI and University of Minnesota with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets, and USAID. This program  generates  reliable  and  accurate data, tools, and knowledge products that help guide strategic  policy  and  investment  decisions  to  improve the well-being of the poor in Africa south of the Sahara through more productive and profitable farming. The wealth of resources HarvestChoice has produced since its creation in 2010 has informed organizational and regional strategies to improve livelihoods. In 2015, HarvestChoice contributed data and analytical  support to the World Bank’s flagship report, Confronting Drought in Africa’s Drylands: Opportunities for Enhancing Resilience, which identified  promising  interventions  to build resilience, quantified their likely costs and benefits, and described potential trade-offs.  The Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa (ASARECA) used  HarvestChoice’s data and analytics tool to develop spatially explicit strategies to better target its efforts to scale up agricultural technology in East and Central Africa. In 2014, HarvestChoice’s district-level indicators were instrumental to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s efforts to identify priority agricultural sectors (dairy, cotton, and others) in Ethiopia and  Tanzania.