Taking advice: Speaking to farmers to inform more effective services

Precision Development (PxD) leverages needs assessment research to inform our agricultural extension services, and we survey our farmers to gauge their opinion of our services. Sourcing information from farmers gives us direct insight into the …

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Research in Progress (and in Practice): 2021 in Review

Precision Development’s goal is to generate large aggregate impacts for the poor. Research plays a central role in advancing that objective. In a collaborative post, our Research Team surveys their work in 2021 and outlines …

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Evidence to Policy – New Video

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s (J-PAL) has showcased PxD as an organization that leveraged the value of randomized evaluations to launch more effective approaches to reducing poverty on a global scale. The video …

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Fighting Poverty through Climate Action

Last week delegates convened in Glasgow at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to engage in the difficult task of negotiating an offramp to climate …

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Accessing the Power of E-Commerce for Smallholder Farmers

Can e-commerce address constraints that inhibit growth and productivity among Indian smallholder farmers? Rohit Goel, a Research and Operations Associate on PxD’s India Team, investigates and traces the contours of an exciting PxD pilot in …

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Generating New Insights for Increased Impact

Tomoko Harigaya, PxD’s Chief Economist and Director of Research, and Caitlin McKee, Global Research Support Manager (with input from across the Research Team) detail lines of new inquiry intended to build our research base and …

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A New Digital Extension Project in Brazil!

We are humbled and thrilled to have been announced as the winners of a tendering process to deliver digital extension services to 100,000 farmers in Brazil’s Northeast Region (NER). The announcement by Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Food Supply (MAPA) on the 6th of July marked the conclusion of a rigorous and competitive five-month-long tendering process.

Kharif in Odisha: A Monsoon of Information

Tarun Pokiya, Lead Agronomist, Prasanna Kumar, Senior Software Engineer, Hannah Timmis, India Research Manager, Tushar Singh, Research and Operations Associate, Srinivas VT, Senior Associate, and Revati Vaidya, Process and Product Innovation Associate, collaborated on this …

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Scaling Advisory Services to Nigerian Farmers in Need

Crystal Aghadi, Research Associate, John Babadara, Program Associate, and Godfrey Petgrave, Agronomist, report on PxD Nigeria’s most ambitious challenge yet: delivering advisory information to over 100,000 Nigerian smallholder farmers.  Team PxD Nigeria is in the …

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Who’s Talking? Varying Narrator Gender to Enhance User Engagement

Sam Carter, Revati Vaidya, Simon Rubangakene, Georges Poquillon and Habtamu Yesiget recount how we improved our content and services by learning about our end-users response to messages recorded with men’s voices and women’s voices. Do farmers act differently when they hear …

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Ploughing Back the Evidence to Empower Women Farmers

As we mark International Women’s Day, this posts reflects upon and celebrate the growing evidence-base of gender-focused research that is intended to inform evidence-based policies and laws to improve the lives of women.

Women, Work, and Women’s Work in International Development

Maya Woser, Senior Research and Operations Associate, Stefania Pozzi, Global Senior Research Associate, and Yifan Powers, Global Senior Research Associate, pull on strands of evidence to assess the effects of patriarchal practices and cultures in …

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