Household-Level Approach for Prioritization of National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPS)

William Martin of the International Food Policy Research Institute in the U.S. will combine existing, high-quality survey data collected from individual households in rural Ethiopia and Nigeria with agricultural information from the Global Agro-Ecological Zone (GAEZ) database to model the impact of specific investments on poor communities to better inform policy decisions. National Agricultural Investment Plans (NAIPS) shape policy development by outlining investments required to stimulate growth in Africa through transformation of the agricultural sector. However, they rarely consider the impact on individual households. To address this, they will use existing household survey data from the Living Standards Measurement Study – Integrated Services on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA), which was designed to dissect the relationship between agriculture and poverty. These data will be combined with the publicly available GAEZ database, which assesses agricultural resources and potential, to model the direct impact of policy decisions, such as investments in research and rural infrastructure (irrigation, electrification), on households. Results of the analysis will help prioritize future agricultural investments for maximum impact on the poorest families.