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News, ideas, and analysis from J-PAL staff and affiliated professors. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly email updates.

A man carries a large sack up a walkway into a truck

Evaluating an agricultural mobile marketplace at scale in Uganda

By
  • Jenna Fahle
On Tuesday, November 9, Craig McIntosh (Professor of Economics at University of California, San Diego) and co-director of the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI), shared evidence from one of the largest market information experiments ever conducted. Jenna Fahle, CEGA Agriculture...
A market vendor stands in front of large sacks of onions

Building systems to improve and reward higher-quality agricultural products

Learn more about our new review of strategies designed to improve the quality of agricultural goods produced and sold at market.
A man squats in a rice paddy looking at a rice plant while holding a cell phone

Affiliate Spotlight: Shawn Cole

Shawn Cole is a Co-Founder and Chair of the Board at Precision Development (PxD), the John G McLean Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and serves as a Co-Chair for J-PAL’s Innovations in Data and Experiments for Action (IDEA) Initiative. For over twenty years, Shawn has...
Nine people having a conversation stand around a board covered in post-it notes

Why aren’t farmers using improved agricultural technologies to increase their profits? Lessons from ten years of research in the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative

By
  • Leah Bridle
Through more than ten years of research in J-PAL and CEGA's Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative, we’ve learned about the range of compounding constraints farmers face as microentrepreneurs, and that the next wave of experimentation should evaluate approaches designed to better include...
Masai herders stand among a herd of goats

Pastoralism in the COVID-19 era

By
  • Philemon Chelanga
  • Indira Tirumala
  • Elizabeth Lyons
Pastoralism is a livestock production system that has been carried out for millennia in some of the world’s harshest environments, including the vast arid of East Africa. This post, written by Philemon Chelanga, Indira Tirumala, and CEGA affiliated professor Elizabeth Lyons, explains how the...

From technology adoption to adaptation: supporting smallholder resilience to climate change

Without adaptation—defined broadly as “preparing for and responding to the disruptive effects of climate change,” it is predicted that 500 million small farms around the world will experience severe impacts on agricultural yields, affecting their income, food security, and well-being.