The European Commission-funded Food Security Portal (FSP), facilitated by IFPRI, seeks to help improve the ability of governments to respond to and prevent food crises by bringing together policy-relevant tools and information in one place. The Food Security Portal is designed to pool information in structured ways to ensure data quality, timeliness, and relevance, as well as the opportunity for collaboration among policymakers, development professionals, and researchers. The recently revamped Food Security Portal (https://www.foodsecurityportal.org/), together with the Africa South of the Sahara Food Security Portal (FSP-SSA) sub-portals, available in English and in French, feature resources on “Best Practices” on selected food security and related topics. The FSP seeks proposals from AGRODEP researchers for research briefs on “evidence-based practices” on any of the following topics:
- Prevention of food losses across the value chain;
- Interventions to enhance household resilience to food crises;
- Infrastructure to increase resilience;
- Trade policies for improved food security;
- Domestic policy responses to mitigate food security impacts of the pandemic;
A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things. The research brief should be based on a review of practices or policy alternatives that have been effective in addressing the issue. Examples from the Food Security Portal are provided below:
Although evidence may be based on any country, evidence-based practices from an African context are highly encouraged.
This call for proposals is open to all AGRODEP members. Collaboration between AGRODEP members or between an AGRODEP member and a non-member is acceptable. Although proposals from an individual or group on multiple topics are acceptable, only one topic will be selected for each applicant or applicant group. A maximum grant award of USD $2,000 is available for each research brief.
Application Dates and Guidelines
- January 11, 2021: Submission deadline for a 1 – 2 page proposal with brief introduction, outline of paper, and initial set of references. Include author(s) and affiliations.
- January 25, 2021: Notification about proposal selection. Start process of drafting a contract. FSP expects to select the five (5) proposals, one for each topic above.
- February 15, 2021: Submission deadline for the first draft of best practices research brief. Paper should be between 1500 – 2000 words (excluding list of references which should be limited to those cited in the text).
- March 1, 2021: Submission deadline for final version of the best practices paper.
Proposals (including a recent CV of the applicant) should be sent to Betina Dimaranan (B.Dimaranan@cgiar.org).