Call for Proposals: Agriculture, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management

AERC encourages female researchers and those from fragile and post-conflict countries to apply.

Themes

• The proposed research themes include, but are not necessarily limited to the following:
  • Promoting food and nutrition security and resilience under conflicts and unstable livelihoods in SSA: what options are available to households?
    • New evidence can be generated regarding smallholder’s agricultural livelihood, food and nutrition security, and conflict relationships using subnational data (agricultural production, nutrition, and conflict data) discussing the various empirical strategies to estimate the causal effect and handle the endogeneity that characterizes the coupling between food and nutrition security and conflict.
  • Climate variability, Urbanization, and Agricultural Productivity in SubSaharan Africa
    • In Sub-Saharan Africa, agriculture is the main source of income for rural dwellers, representing 60 percent of employment.
    • This research theme aims to examine the relationships between agriculture, climate change and migration, and their consequences disentangling the transmission channels such as agricultural productivity, conflict, rapid urbanization, etc.
  • Sustainability of Agriculture, Adaptation to Climate change and Vulnerability to Covid-19
    • Global value chains and access to markets have been heavily disrupted by the Covid 19 pandemic adding supplemental pressure on food security particularly in developing countries.
  • Climate change and Risk Management strategies in Sub-Saharan Africa
    • Studies on this theme can help understand how some agricultural actors have developed a way of managing these risks and what policy may be proffered to help them overcome the challenges.
  • Implications of Population growth, Demographic transition and digitalization on sustainable Agricultural growth and development in Sub-Saharan Africa
    • Specific concerns include assessing the implications of a digitalized agricultural system on the demographic trend and growth of youth population in SSA, while paying attention to gender, youths, and most vulnerable groups.
  • Land rights and tenure security: implications for agricultural productivity growth and natural resource exploitation in sub-Saharan Africa
    • Agriculture is Africa’s comparative advantage. The continent has an estimated 600 million hectares of uncultivated arable land (about 65% of the global total). However, poorly defined property rights and often difficult to understand land-tenure systems and difficulties in gaining access to land may be hampering the ability of Africans to use agriculture as an effective foundation for economic development.
  • Natural Resource Exploitation and Impacts on Agricultural productivity in Africa
    • Natural resources (land, water, soil, plants and animals) extraction plays a crucial and growing role in Sub-Saharan economies, as revealed by the continent’s share of natural capital in its aggregate wealth which is the second highest in the world.
    • Evidence on the key interactions, along with the impacts of these interactions on increased productivity in the agricultural sector should contribute to fill the gap on the documentation of the impacts of natural resources on agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • How will management of Africa’s water resources affect socio-economic development in the years to come in Africa?
    • Research under this call could help African countries find ways to:
      • Improve the efficiency of water use, which specifically include issues of the demand for water (e.g., for household use, especially in urban sectors, as well for use in agriculture and other commercial pursuits), and
      • Cooperate efficiently over transboundary waters management.
  • The Impact of Agricultural Input Subsidies Programs in Africa
    • Input subsidy programs (ISPs) remain one of the most controversially debated agricultural development policies in SubSaharan Africa. On the one hand, subsidies may induce the adoption of improved inputs and thereby stimulate small farmers’ agricultural productivity and food security. On the other hand, many economists argue that input subsidies not only contributed weakly to agricultural productivity growth, food security but also have distortionary effects as they hindered the development of the private input subsidy market.
  • What types of financial innovations can both formal and informal financial institutions provide for the financing of sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural sector?
    • Traditionally, smallholder farmers depended heavily on informal sources of financing, which include credit from family- or ethnic-based savings associations. Unfortunately, these financing sources are no longer adequate to support the needs of an increasing population.
  • Contribution of Agriculture to recent African Economic growth and macroeconomic development
    • A detailed study of the place of agriculture in economic development, interrelations between agricultural and industrial urban development, agricultural employment and unemployment, agricultural policy, agricultural productivity, agricultural finance and investment and economic development, comparative farming systems research and agricultural innovation, as well as largescale private investment, government’s expenditures (level and allocation) in agriculture related public goods, subsidies and tax policy affect agriculture.
  • Promoting the use of Alternative and ‘Big-Data’ in Agricultural, Climate Change and Natural Resources Management Research in Africa.
    • This thematic area’s aims are encouraging the use of alternative and non-traditional data (satellite and ‘big-data’) in agricultural, climate change and natural resources management in Africa.

Funding Information

• Researchers whose proposals have been accepted receive a research grant ranging between USD9000-USD12000 as well as intense mentoring by world class researchers with extensive expertise in the areas of Agriculture, Climate Change and Natural Resource Management, macro and micro econometrics, impacts evaluation, and related disciplines.

For more information, visit AERC.