On June 3, 2020, the MRR Innovation Lab in collaboration with the Global Resilience Partnership, hosted the webinar, Generating Resilience Plus to Reduce Poverty and Spur Agricultural Growth. This 1.5 hour interactive event with leaders from development research and policy highlighted field work from Africa and South Asia showing evidence for Resilience+ and placed Resilience+ in a policy framework to guide donors, practitioners and policy makers interested in increasing development impacts and expanding the resilience of vulnerable populations around the world.

Webinar recording

For many rural families in developing economies, a single drought or flood can create immediate economic distress as well as lingering effects that can last generations. Even the risk of these disasters can create lasting hardship. Recent evidence shows that effectively managing these risks not only promotes stability in the face of shocks, but can also increase agricultural productivity and prosperity.

Resilience+ encompasses the idea that reliable risk-management tools help families to become more immediately able to withstand a shock but creates the security to invest for higher future incomes. This is the potential of Resilience+ and the reason the MRR Innovation Lab and its research partners are pursuing risk management innovations to reduce poverty and spur agricultural growth.

Contributors

• Deon Nel – CEO, Global Resilience Partnership
• Jami Montgomery – Division Chief for the Resilient Communities and Systems Division, Bureau for Resilience and Food Security/Center for Resilience, USAID
• Michael Carter – Professor, UC Davis; Director, Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience
• Andrew Mude – Lead, Scaling Technology and Market Access for Smallholder Farmers at the African Development Bank (AfDB)
• Ghada Elabed – Agriculture Economist at the Global Engagement unit of the Agriculture and Food Global Practice, World Bank
• Gregory Lane –  Professor, Economics Department, American University
• Samuel Collin Ssenyimba – Program Officer, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Find the PDFs of the Presentation Slide Deck and the Chat Transcript below. Additional resources can be found under "Related Publications" on the right hand side of this page. For questions relating to this webinar, please contact Sophie Javers at: sejavers (at) ucdavis.edu.