What's New

Use, control, and ownership of productive assets – land, money, livestock, and education, to name just a few – are essential stepping stones on the path out of poverty. But this pathway can look very different depending on whether you are a man or a woman. Growing evidence suggests that women typically have fewer assets than men, and that they use those assets differently. What’s more, agricultural development programs may impact men’s and women’s assets in different, sometimes unexpected, ways.

Micronutrient malnutrition is caused by a lack of vitamins and minerals in the diet. Poor people are particularly vulnerable to micronutrient malnutrition, as their diets consist mainly of grains and don’t include many vital fruits, vegetables or animal products.

FEWS Net has issued an alert for East Africa, stating that a delayed start to the annual June-September rains is threatening harvests throughout the region. While rainfall has improved in recent weeks, FEWS estimates that normal rainfall would need to not only continue for the remainder of the season but extend past the normal rainy season in order for crops to fully recover. In large areas of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, total rainfall has been 20-50 percent lower than average.

Nearly 30 years after the 1984 famine that left more than 400,000 people dead, Ethiopia has made significant progress toward food security. Some of these recent successes include a reduction in poverty, an increase in crop yields and availability, and an increase in per capita income—rising in some rural areas by more than 50 percent!

What happened to cause this breakthrough, and what steps does the country need to stay on track?

After being largely eliminated by structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s, large-scale input subsidy programs are regaining popularity throughout the developing world, particularly in Africa south of the Sahara. It's estimated that African countries spend, on average, 30 percent of their agriculture budgets on these programs, which aim to increase small farmers' investments in new technologies and increase agricultural production. Despite these programs' widespread use, however, debate abounds about how efficient input subsidy programs actually are.