This post is written by Kevin Chen , Mark Leclair , Esmail Karamidehkordi , Carl Larsen , and Suresh Babu for DLEC and published first on Agrilinks . There is increasing concern that the COVID-19 pandemic will have dire consequences for food security unless adequate safeguards are established. Food supply chains must continue to function; the healt...

Envisioning the Future of ExtensionEvent Report Washington, D.C., March 4-5, 2020  Introduction The Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity Annual Community of Practice Convening took place in Washington, D.C. on March 4-5, 2020. The event was co-organized by DLEC, a USAID funded project led by Digital Green in partnership with Int...

  While Bangladesh has witnessed some recent success in improving food security in Bangladesh, such as tripling its rice production, some challenges remain. A key challenge is that of connecting smallholder farmers to markets so that they can realise the best prices possible for their produce. There are of course many factors that contribute t...

An event sponsored by the Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity Project   ​ Event Summary The Feed the Future Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project hosted its second annual Community of Practice convening in March 2019 in Kampala, Uganda. The Convening was attended by representatives from the United States Agency for...

Ten years ago, the global food price crisis dramatically highlighted how food systems are dynamically interconnected. The crisis also revealed how serious gender disparities can exacerbate the precariousness of women farmers who face economic, social, and weather or climate shocks. It spurred large investments in country and project-level data coll...

Last month, I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh with my colleagues hosting an event on "Exploring Agriculture Innovations in Bangladesh to Improve Food Security" on behalf of Feed the Future 's Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) program, which Digital Green leads in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), CARE In...

People often end up making suboptimal choices because they lack critical pieces of information , fail to notice important features of the data they possess , or believe things that are not true . Indeed, these " informational inefficiencies " are considered an important reason why farmers in developing countries miss out on the benefits of modern t...

Originally published by Spore Magazine: http://spore.cta.int/en/debates/opinion/innovation-vs-strength-what-is-the-future-of-ict-in-extension.html The disruptive force of technology is difficult to predict. As those of us in the space can attest, agricultural extension is due for a transformation, but there won't be a 'silver bullet'. We know the f...

An unpredictable summer storm in southwest Bangladesh last April caused many farmers, like Abdul Mannan, to make some tough decisions. The government of Bangladesh estimates about 1.2 million tons of rice was lost because farmers were forced to harvest their paddy crops sooner than expected, which created a labor shortage and an increase in labor w...

Originally published by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs: https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/blog/global-food-thought/guest-commentary-data-amplify-agricultural-development I recently moved back to the United States, and I can tell you most people here still think of Grant Wood's American Gothic painting when they think of farmers. The reality ...