Food Security III Cooperative Agreement Projects

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1. Partnering with African institutions, USAID Missions, and individual analysts and decision makers.
2. Integrating research, outreach, capacity building and institutional strengthening.
3. A focus on both individual and collective action.
4. “Disaggregated” research that looks below the macro level to examine regional, village, household, and gender-level impacts.
5. Conducting policy analysis with attention to implementation in the real-world setting of a given country.

1. Improving food systems performance. Sub themes include strengthening agricultural productivity, specific commodity value chains and input/output market performance and trade.
2. Understanding household income/livelihood dynamics. Illustrative topics include the level and distribution of rural assets, collective actions for financing social and infrastructure investments, and responding to rising prime-age mortality.
3. Understanding food security/natural resource management interactions — towards a greener and safer food security.

(research papers and outreach for these themes)

• Its collaborative approach, both with USAID offices and with host-country institutions and individuals. The research designed jointly with these clients and is implemented jointly in a way that strengthens the capacity of local organizations to carry out this type of policy-oriented research and outreach in the future.
  
• The commitment of a critical mass of MSU faculty to the program. The core Food Security faculty team includes 17 members who have over 300 years of professional experience, including some 170 person-years of work on previous MSU African food security projects. Fourteen faculty currently work full-time on African food security issues, with the remaining three devoting on average over 50% of their time to these issues (exclusive of teaching). Two are African nationals. The team works closely with other faculty members in MSU's Department of Agricultural Economics, who also have substantial experience in Africa and other developing areas and work extensively with African students. Most of the faculty team members have lived as long-term residents in some 19 Sub Sahara African (SSA) countries, (excluding the experience of our African faculty members), provided long-term backstopping support to projects in an additional 7 African countries, and have short-term experience in an additional 4 countries. Their extensive first-hand experience thus covers over 30 SSA countries. Among the various team members, there is professional working proficiency in 14 European and/or African languages. (Core team member profiles.)
  
• The core group has been sufficiently strong and large that it has attracted outstanding graduate students and has provided extremely valuable backstopping for in-country researchers.
  
• The commitment to go beyond macro-level data to analyze critical food security issues. The project emphasizes the collecting and analyzing of household, firm, and market-level data to see the people-level involvement and impacts of various measures taken (or not taken) to stimulate economic growth and foster food security (see FS III training materials on survey research at: http://www.aec.msu.edu/fs2/survey/index.htm and on collection and analysis of cross-sectional household survey data on rural morbidity and mortality: lessons learned from initial surveys at: http://www.aec.msu.edu/fs2/adult_death/index.htm.