Project description
Increasing agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africans suffer from low agricultural productivity and recurrent episodes of severe hunger. Modern agricultural inputs have hardly been adopted, yet the looming threat of climate change will require substantial adaptation. The ERC-funded ADAPT project will quantify the extent of input misallocation in agriculture by using biophysical models of plant growth. It will trial a new approach to encourage the efficient adoption of agricultural inputs by farmers. Furthermore, it will develop new methodologies to measure agricultural output accurately and cost-effectively. Through these efforts, the project seeks to improve livelihoods in the region.
Objective
Agricultural productivity is strikingly low in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, exposing the large fraction of the population who lives from agriculture to low incomes and periods of hunger. Despite high returns to modern agricultural inputs elsewhere, their adoption in the region has been persistently low over the past decades. In the absence of adaptation, climate change is expected to severely impact the agricultural productivity of Sub-Saharan Africa. I propose three projects which will significantly improve our ability to understand the effect of modern agricultural inputs for agricultural productivity, and encourage their efficient adoption. First, existing methods for measuring the outcome of interest are notoriously imprecise, or costly, which is a fundamental limitation for research on agricultural productivity in developing countries. I will develop and evaluate an approach to substantially improve the precision with which researchers can measure agricultural output, at low costs. Second, existing approaches to encourage the adoption of modern agricultural inputs have had muted success. I will test a potentially highly impactful, novel approach: teaching farmers how to assess the returns to agricultural inputs on their own plots. In light of heterogeneous returns to input adoption across plots, this promises to encourage the right farmers to adopt the right inputs for their plots. And third, existing approaches to assess the degree of misallocation of inputs and associated output losses rely on strong functional form assumptions. I will leverage the plot-level estimates of returns generated in the second project as well as the knowledge embedded in bio-physical models of plant growth to quantify the extent of misallocation of inputs in agriculture. This radically new methodology to quantify misallocation will yield substantially more credible estimates, and has the potential to significantly expand the possibilities to learn about the sources of misallocation.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
10691 Stockholm
Sweden
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.