SPIA has developed a comprehensive, country-level approach to documenting the adoption and diffusion of agricultural innovations linked to CGIAR research. The first focal country for this approach is Ethiopia, where SPIA has been working since 2015.
The approach involves three stages:

In 2005, India passed the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, “the Act”), a law guaranteeing all rural households 100 days of work at a minimum wage through the building of durable assets, which created one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the world. Now known as the Mahatma Gandhi NREGA (MGNREGA), a notable feature of the program is that it envisions a democratic, bottom-up process of choosing which durable assets would be built within a community.

This study assessed the impact of engagements by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) at policy and household levels in Kenya. Specifically, the study assessed the extent to which CCAFS engagement contributed to the observed changes in terms of shaping policy and climate-smart agriculture (CSA) coordination among others.

Understanding the factors driving the farmers’ decisions to diversify their crop production is important for management strategies and policies promoting climate-smart agricultural development. Options for diversification and its associated drivers might be shaped by livelihood context, and it remains as a general gap in knowledge. This study aimed to reveal the driving factors behind households’ decisions to diversify their crops in different livelihood contexts.

Biodiversity is recognized as an essential part of sustainable development efforts, however reducing biodiversity loss is a key global challenge that requires updated data on biodiversity status at different scales. Cocoa agro-forests include tree species besides cocoa, a practice beneficial to biodiversity, ecosystem conservation and farming households. We present a stepwise procedure to test and select a method that rapidly assesses biodi-versity in cocoa agroforests based primarily on species richness and counts of non-cocoa trees.

Focusing on gender, this study describes mixed farming systems using data collected for monitoring, evaluation, learning, and impact assessment (MELIA) from 1268 household heads, 838 spouses, and 2731 plots in Malawi; and 1317 household heads, 1302 spouses, and 4017 plots in Ghana. The study also includes the perception of selected gender norms among household heads and spouses in Ghana.

Big data and mobile technology are widely claimed to be global disruptive forces in agriculture that benefit small-scale farm-ers. Yet the access of small-scale farmers to this technology is poorly understood. We show that only 24–37% of farms of <1 ha in size are served by third generation (3G) or 4G services, compared to 74–80% of farms of >200 ha in size. Furthermore, croplands with severe yield gaps, climate-stressed locations and food-insecure populations have poor service coverage.

Increased diversification of rural households into the rural non-farm economy is an important driver of economic growth and structural transformation in countries like Ethiopia where the vast majority of people live in rural areas and are largely dependent on seasonal agriculture. Some of the benefits of diversification include efficient utilization of asset endowments (e.g., labor during dry season) and reduction of risks.

Resilience has traditionally been understood as a function of observable and measurable characteristics. More recently, discussions of household resilience have emphasized the need to pay attention to resilience as a set of capacities. What this paper aims to develop is a framework and a methodology for accounting both tangible and intangible characteristics found in the household, that is, measuring assets, social capital, as well as inherent personal characteristics or traits of the household decision-maker that may or may not predispose a household to be resilient.

Sustainable agrifood systems have the potential to significantly impact the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Cameroon. However, there is a gender disparity in the adoption of these technologies due to various sociocultural norms and gender dynamics. In 2020, 351 southern and eastern Cameroonian farming households were surveyed. Gender roles, decision-making, and sustainable agrifood systems were studied using a multistage random sample.

Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is a widespread problem in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Here the population is predominantly reliant plant-based diets. Thus, identification of popular food sources with higher vitamin A contents is a suitable means for addressing VAD. For example, Burundi has a VAD prevalence of 46%. In this region, bananas and plantains are a cheap staple food crop and therefore, offer a good avenue for supplying vitamin A in the diets.

With economic development agricultural systems in the Global South transform from subsistence farming to higher productivity with market integration and increase in rural income and food security. In Nepal, agriculture continues to provide livelihoods for two-thirds of the predominantly rural population, largely at a subsistence-level. Rice is the staple food and covers the largest land area but yields are relatively low, with an annual import bill of USD 300 Million. The study uses data from 310 households from two distinct rice producing areas to assess farmers' rice production systems.