IFPRI Podcast International Food Policy Research Institute

POLICY SEMINAR
Deepening Social Protection Systems: Enhancing livelihoods and health in Ethiopia
APR 17, 2024 - 10:30AM TO 12:00PM EDT

Twenty years after the establishment of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), a major social protection system, the country’s government, donors, and other stakeholders are implementing multidimensional graduation model programs that are designed to complement the PSNP’s monthly food and cash transfers. Graduation models include multiple interventions such as large asset or lump-sum transfers, training, savings promotion, and other forms of nutrition, health, or psychosocial support. These models aim to move beyond cash or food transfers to ensure minimum consumption levels and address the multiple challenges that can trap poor households in poverty.

This event will present findings from a randomized controlled trial of Strengthening PSNP Institutions and Resilience (SPIR), a graduation model program embedded within the PSNP that is led by World Vision, in collaboration with CARE and ORDA, and with support from the Ethiopian government and USAID. Speakers will present evidence about the impact of this intervention across multiple domains, including health, nutrition, livelihoods, and women’s empowerment, and examine its implications for the design of graduation model interventions across low- and middle-income countries. This policy seminar builds on the SPIR II Learning Event (https://www.ifpri.org/event/spir-ii-learning-event) conducted in Addis Ababa in 2023.

Welcoming Remarks
Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, Senior Research Fellow/Program Leader- Ethiopia, IFPRI

SPIR: Overview of the Randomized Trial Design
Daniel Gilligan, Director, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI

Can a Light-Touch Graduation Model Enhance Livelihood Outcomes and Resilience?
Jessica Leight, Research Fellow, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI

Including Scalable Nutrition Interventions in a Graduation Model Program
Harold Alderman, Senior Research Fellow, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI

Effectiveness of a Men’s Engagement Intervention to Change Attitudes and Behaviors
Melissa Hidrobo, Senior Research Fellow, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI

Treating Depression Among the Extreme Poor
Michael Mulford, Chief of Party, SPIR II, World Vision

Expert Panel
Dean Karlan, Professor of Economics and Finance, Frederic Esser Nemmers Chair; Co-Director, Global Poverty Research Lab, Northwestern University; Chief Economist, United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
Margaux Vinez, Senior Economist; Africa, Social Protection and Jobs, World Bank

Moderators
Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, Senior Research Fellow/Program Leader- Ethiopia, IFPRI
Daniel Gilligan, Director, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI

More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/deepening-social-protection-systems-enhancing-livelihoods-and-health-ethiopia
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CGIAR SEMINAR SERIES
Post COP28 Priorities for Advancing Food Systems Transformation
Co-organized by IFPRI, CGIAR, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
MAR 27, 2024 - 9:30 TO 11:00AM EDT / 14:30 TO 16:00 CET

Held in 2023, the planet’s hottest year on record, COP28 has been heralded for its strong focus on food systems, which are simultaneously threatened by and contribute to climate change. The COP28 Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action, albeit non-binding, but endorsed by almost 160 countries, emphasizes the transformative potential of agriculture and food systems in responding to climate change and ensuring global food security.

Insufficient climate finance represents a significant barrier to achieving climate-resilient and low-emission food systems. Given that smallholders produce the majority of the global food supply, special attention to their finance needs is critical.

As the fifth policy seminar in the CGIAR series on Strengthening Food Systems Resilience, this virtual event will take stock of food systems–related outcomes from COP28 and outline priorities for advancing them at both the international and country level in a concrete and meaningful manner.

Please join a distinguished set of speakers from CGIAR, international organizations, and the policy community for this discussion on advancing both adaptation and mitigation of food systems, which will place a particular focus on climate finance and policy priorities.

Taking Stock of COP28 Outcomes
Felicitas Röhrig, Senior Policy Officer, German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
Aditi Mukerji, Director, Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Impact Action Platform of the CGIAR
Kristofer Hamel, Head, Food Systems, COP28 Presidency; UAE Climate Change Special Envoy

Advancing on Climate Change Finance
Geeta Sethi, Advisor and Global Lead for Food Systems, World Bank
Johan Swinnen, Managing Director, Systems Transformation, CGIAR; Director General, IFPRI

Country level Policy Priorities and Needs
Agnes Kalibata, President, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) - Represented by Boaz Keizire, Head of Policy & Advocacy, AGRA
Qingfeng Zhang, Senior Director, Agriculture, Food, Nature, and Rural Development Sector Office, Asian Development Bank

Preparing for COP29 and COP30
Nigar Arpadarai, UN Climate Change High Level Champion for COP29 Azerbaijan; Member of Parliament of the Republic of Azerbaijan
Eduardo Brito Bastos, Agronomic Engineer (ESALQ/USP)
Juan Lucas Restrepo, Global Director of Partnerships & Advocacy, CGIAR; Director General of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT

Moderator
Roula Majdalani, Climate Change Advisor, International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)

More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/post-cop28-priorities-advancing-food-systems-transformation
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LAUNCH EVENT
Global Food 50/50 Launch Event
Co-organized by Global Health 50/50, IFPRI, and UN Women
MAR 7, 2024 - 9:00 TO 10:30AM EST / 1:00 TO 2:30pm BST

The Global Food 50/50 initiative monitors progress and holds food system organizations accountable for advancing gender-just and equitable food systems. This event marks the launch of the third annual Global Food 50/50 Report, which reviews the gender- and equity-related policies and practices of 51 global food system organizations to assess two interlinked dimensions of inequality: inequality of opportunity in careers within organizations and inequality in who benefits from the global food system.

For the first time, the 2023/2024 Report expands its focus to address a policy area that plays a decisive role in promoting equality of opportunity in the workplace: the extent to which workplace policies recognize and support employees’ care responsibilities. The data reveal policy attention to parental leave, but other policies related to family needs, such as child care and elder care, remain scarce.

This launch event seminar will present key findings from the report and explore how this new accountability mechanism can empower a broader movement to demand more equitable and inclusive organizations across the global food system.

Introductory Remarks
Johan Swinnen, Managing Director, Systems Transformation, CGIAR and Director General, IFPRI

Keynote Address
Jamille Bigio, Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment, United States Agency for International Development (USAID)

Results of 2022 Global Food 50/50 Report
Jemimah Njuki, Chief, Economic Empowerment, UN Women
Sonja Tanaka, Deputy Director, Global Health 50/50

Panelists
Ananda Uvl, Head of Public Affairs and Corporate Communications, East-West Seed
Juan Echanove, Associate Vice President, Food and Water Systems, CARE
Susan Kaaria, Director, African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD)
Santiago Alba-Corral, Director, Climate-Resilient Food Systems, International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Closing Remarks
Sarah Hawkes, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Global Health 50/50

Moderator
Hazel Malapit, Senior Research Coordinator, IFPRI

More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/global-food-5050-launch-event-0
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CGIAR SEMINAR SERIES
Reforming Agricultural Policies and Farm Support to Advance Sustainable Food System Transformation
Co-organized by IFPRI, CGIAR, and Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)
15:00 TO 16:45 CET
FEB 29, 2024 - 9:00 TO 10:45AM EST

In the recent COP28 Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action, world leaders affirmed that “agriculture and food systems must urgently adapt and transform in order to respond to the imperatives of climate change.” This declaration strengthens the growing global consensus that current food systems need urgent transformative change to end hunger and all forms of malnutrition and to make food production and delivery systems resilient and sustainable.

Evidence-based policies are critical to steer such a transformation, which requires urgent action from governments around the world—both in the global North and the global South—to better align, reform, or repurpose current policies and public support to deliver better value for people, planet, and prosperity. Public investments and other expenditures help to create incentives for producers and other food system actors as they choose what, how, and where to produce food, as well as for consumers in their choices of what foods to eat.

The seminar will highlight key IFPRI findings on the potential to repurpose existing agriculture policies and public support to accelerate the transformation of food systems to become more inclusive, resilient, sustainable, and healthy. Developing appropriate incentives to encourage producers to adopt technological innovations and sustainable practices, and consumers to make healthy and sustainable food choices, will help deliver desired food system outcomes, but doing so will require bold action through both international coordination and national-level policy reform.

The seminar will present available evidence on promising technological innovations from CGIAR and elsewhere, identify associated tradeoffs, and examine how policies can shape greater uptake of such innovations. It will highlight global initiatives seeking to advance agricultural policy reform and assess the evidence base behind these initiatives, as well as examining country-level attempts at reform and the obstacles these reforms can face in both the global North and global South.

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Johan Swinnen, Managing Director, Systems Transformation, CGIAR; Director General, IFPRI
Jan Brix, Senior Policy Officer, Division of Agriculture and Rural Development, German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ)

Science for Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems
Loraine Ronchi, CGIAR Senior Advisor for Policy Impact, IFPRI
Will Martin, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI

Panel 1: Global Initiatives for Agricultural Policy Reform
Representative of the Presidency (Brazil) (Invited)
Debbie Palmer, Director for Energy, Climate and Environment, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)
Sergiy Zorya, Lead Agriculture Economist and Global Lead for Policies and Public Expenditures, Agricultural and Food Global Practice, The World Bank

Panel 2: Regional and National Policy Reform Experiences
Alan Mathews, Professor Emeritus, Dept. of Economics, Trinity College, Dublin
Shenggen Fan, Chair Professor, College of Economics and Management at China Agricultural University, CGIAR System Board member
Patrick Ofori, Deputy Director, Head of M&E Division at Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA), Policy Planning Monitoring & Evaluation Directorate (PPMED)

Moderator
Charlotte Hebebrand, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, IFPRI

More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/reforming-agricultural-policies-and-farm-support-advance-sustainable-food-system
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POLICY SEMINAR
Introducing the new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS)
FEB 22, 2024 - 9:00 TO 10:30AM EST

The new Women’s Empowerment Metric for National Statistical Systems (WEMNS) https://weai.ifpri.info/wemns/ is a streamlined tool for measuring women’s empowerment, intended for use in large-scale, multitopic surveys conducted by national statistical systems. WEMNS is designed to measure empowerment in households with all types of livelihoods, in both urban and rural areas, complementing the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) https://weai.ifpri.info/, which focuses on agricultural households. WEMNS was developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Emory University, Oxford University, and the World Bank’s Living Standards Measurement Study Unit in collaboration with country partners and the 50x2030 Initiative, supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development.

This event will present the WEMNS metric, review the development of the tool, and discuss its use to advance women’s empowerment. A panel of stakeholders from government and national statistical offices and from multilateral organizations will discuss the potential of WEMNS for promoting and monitoring women’s empowerment as part of national statistical surveys.

Welcome Remarks
Johan Swinnen, Managing Director, Systems Transformation, CGIAR; Director General, IFPRI

WEMNS: The Next Stage of Developing Empowerment Metrics
Agnes Quisumbing, Senior Research Fellow, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI
Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Senior Research Fellow, Natural Resources and Resilience Unit, IFPRI

Intro to WEMNS
Jessica Heckert, Research Fellow, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI
Greg Seymour, Research Fellow, Natural Resources and Resilience Unit, IFPRI

Maximizing the Potential of WEMNS: Panel Discussion
Shelton Kanyanda, Director of Agriculture and Economic Statistics, National Statistical Office, Malawi
Regina Valiente, Sectorialista recursos naturales, tierra y vivienda, Secretaría Presidencial de la Mujer (SEPREM)
Heather Moylan, Senior Economist, Development Data Group, Development Economics, World Bank
Chiara Brunelli, Statistician, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

Closing Remarks
Chiara Kovarik, Senior Program Officer, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)
Farzana Ramzan, Senior Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Advisor, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (invited)

Moderator
Hazel Malapit, Senior Research Coordinator, Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit, IFPRI

More about this Event: https://www.ifpri.org/event/introducing-new-womens-empowerment-metric-national-statistical-systems-wemns
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SPECIAL EVENT
From Commitments to Impact: Analyzing the Global Commitments Toward Promoting Food Security and Healthy Diets
Co-organized by IFPRI and The Rockefeller Foundation
FEB 6, 2024 - 9:00 TO 10:30AM EST

Since the mid-2010s, progress in reducing food insecurity and improving diet quality has stalled. Multiple shocks, including the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, have exacerbated the situation and put Sustainable Development Goal 2 on Zero Hunger further out of reach.

There have been many calls for action to address the food and diets crisis facing vulnerable people around the world. The private sector has been called on to invest in transforming food systems—at an annual rate of $320 billion—while the development banks have been asked to align financial incentives with food system-related goals. While some of these actors have stepped up, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) opening of a food shock window to channel funds to countries beset by crisis, ultimately, progress depends on governments. National governments are responsible, and can be held accountable, for ensuring food security; healthy, diverse diets; and stable, dignified livelihoods, for their populations.

Since the SDGs were announced in 2015, governments in both high-income countries and low- and middle-income countries have made commitments to actions to address food insecurity and poor diets by 2030, including at the UN General Assembly, the World Health Assembly, the G-20, and the UN Food Systems Summit. What remains uncertain at this midway point is which commitments and actions are most salient, whether and how much global and linked national commitments are both fit-for-purpose and fit for the future, and to what extent these commitments have the potential to address known challenges to achieving SDG goals on food security and healthy diets.

This seminar will shed light on commitments already made, share research results on the potential of current commitments to achieve a focused set of food and nutrition security goals, and foster continued dialogue with global advocacy partners. A brunch reception will follow the presentations.

Opening Remarks
Johan Swinnen, Managing Director, Systems Transformation, CGIAR and Director General, IFPRI
Catherine Bertini, Managing Director, Food Initiative, The Rockefeller Foundation

Report Findings
Purnima Menon, Senior Director, Food and Nutrition Policy, CGIAR and IFPRI

Global Scenarios for Food Security: An imperative for action
Rob Vos, Director, Markets, Trade and Institutions (MTI), IFPRI

From Commitments to Impact
Christina Zorbas, Postdoctoral Researcher, Global Centre for Preventive Health and Nutrition in the Institute for Health Transformation, Deakin University
Shoba Suri, Senior Fellow, Health Initiative, Observer Research Foundation
Elyse Iruhiriye, Associate Research Fellow, IFPRI

Implications of Findings
Purnima Menon, Senior Director, Food and Nutrition Policy, CGIAR and IFPRI

Panelists
Mwandwe Chileshe, Director, Food Security Nutrition and Agriculture, Global Citizen
Oliver Camp, Environment and Food Systems Advocacy Advisor, The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)
Alexandre Brecher, Communications and Advocacy Advisor, Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement
Pedro Vormittag, Deputy Director for External Relations, Brazilian Center of International Relations (CEBRI)

Moderators
Purnima Menon, Senior Director, Food and Nutrition Policy, CGIAR and IFPRI
Asma Lateef, Policy and Advocacy Lead, SDG2 Advocacy Hub

Links:
The Rockefeller Foundation: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/
From Promises To Action: Analyzing Global Commitments On Food Security And Diets Since 2015: https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/c700ac9e-1b22-4319-b285-7e14e395b566
The SDGs And Food System Challenges: Global Trends And Scenarios Toward 2030: https://cgspace.cgiar.org/items/2961e6f2-5da4-41b4-80fe-8c61a02072a6