In October 2016, the Feed the Future program released their new Global Food Security Strategy. This whole-of-government guiding document elevated resilience to a top objective of its global food security and poverty reduction efforts.

In 2016, the Assets & Market Access Innovation Lab has continued its pursuit of rigorous, policy-relevant research designed to reduce poverty and promote inclusive agricultural growth.

The BASIS AMA Innovation Lab has assembled a portfolio of projects that focus on key topics designed to bridge the gap between what is possible given currently available technologies and the experiences of most developing country agriculturalists.

With these new projects, the BASIS consortium is now home to more projects than ever before. This scale gives us critical mass around several research topics, creating synergies and learning spillovers amongst our projects and the opportunity to speak authoritatively to long-standing questions in development.

At the date of this report, BASIS now has a full program with 17 projects spread nearly evenly across these three areas. While many of these projects are just now beginning, this past year has seen three especially important findings emerge from the BASIS research portfolio.

Any university-based research program needs to continue to push the frontiers by exploring basic ideas about the nature and causes of poverty and rural development, with the initiation of the new BASIS AMA CRSP in 2006 it was also clear that the time had come to explore concrete and practical solutions.

By employing rigorous impact evaluation and research methods on index insurance products, our exciting new pilot projects will help rural families link to new economic growth opportunities.

After beginning with abstract concepts, BASIS moved to empirical investigation and innovative pilot projects designed to ameliorate chronic poverty. Now beginning its fourth year, BASIS AMA CRSP findings are starting to show real impact on the ground.

Beginning in 2001, BASIS began a series of basic research projects in eastern and southern Africa that probed the nature of chronic and persistent poverty. Much of this work had important conceptual elements, and while seemingly abstract, laid the groundwork for what some have come to recognize as the “BASIS approach to chronic poverty.”

Addressing the challenge of poverty requires multiple approaches, since the pathways from rural poverty are not the same for all people in all places.

These core BASIS projects ended in the past year, and researchers have been turning the findings into policy recommendations.

The BASIS portfolio of eight carefully-selected research projects is designed to create knowledge about the constraints and deliver innovative policy solutions that will remove, relax, or sidestep them.

With a cutting edge and innovative research program, BASIS produces impacts through its publications, training, education, capacity building, and informed policy recommendations that help facilitate broadly based and sustainable economic growth.