By Dr. Mercy Salami, University of Ilorin, Nigeria
Background
This blog is based on a webinar held 24th July 2025 in which Professor Michael R. Carter of the University of California delivered a thought-provoking webinar, the event was moderated by Dr. Mercy Salami, University of Ilorin (RCA lead). The webinar served as the official launch for the ‘Innovating Resilience: Advancing Inclusive Agricultural Innovation for Climate Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa’ Research Coordination Area (RCA). The session unpacked an innovative concept, “Resilience-plus” and its transformative potential for smallholder farming systems across Africa. This webinar is part of the on-going AfricaLics webinar series focusing on the broader topic around development of the Innovation & Development field of study in Africa.
Introduction
On 24 July 2025, the AfricaLics Innovating Resilience: Advancing Inclusive Agricultural Innovation for Climate Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa RCA was launched to stimulate rigorous dialogue and knowledge sharing on inclusive agricultural technologies and their role in promoting climate resilience, social equity, and sustainable development across the continent of Africa. The RCA is also poised to strengthen research capacity, provide evidence to support policy, and foster cross-country collaboration among networks of scholars and policymakers. This RCA seeks to advance conversations around inclusive agricultural innovations for climate resilience in sub-Sahara Africa with particular emphasis on gender, inequalities and promoting the production of underutilized and indigenous crops through agrobiodiversity, using agricultural innovation systems approach. This RCA aligns with the AfricaLics agenda, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the African Union Agenda 2063 by contributing to knowledge production and dissemination in the field of Innovation and Development (I&D), build (strengthen) research capacity and collaboration among scholars, and providing data and evidence to inform policy decisions on the continent.
This webinar explored how inclusive agricultural innovation can enhance climate resilience, reduce rural poverty, and promote sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa. The speaker drew on his extensive research and experience in agricultural economics to expound promising approaches such as digital tools, index insurance, and social protection linkages that support smallholder farmers and marginalized communities in Africa. The discussion highlighted actionable strategies for ensuring that technological advancements in agriculture are accessible, equitable, and scalable in the face of growing climate challenges.
From Risk to Opportunity
Smallholder farmers in low-income countries face a persistent challenge: shocks and the fear of shocks such as droughts, price collapses, or pest outbreaks deter investment, trap households in poverty, and risk creating an exclusionary agricultural transformation where low-wealth farmers are left behind. Professor Carter noted that removing risk from the system not only helps farmers withstand shocks but also unlocks their capacity to invest, adopt innovations, and grow. This dual effect, resilience against shocks plus long-term productivity gains, is what he calls resilience-plus.
Measuring Resilience
To assess the value of resilience-building interventions, Carter and collaborators developed the Cumulative Avoided Loss (CAL) measure. CAL compares what farmers’ economic well-being would have been without a shock to their actual outcomes, capturing both immediate recovery (Type I resilience) and reduced vulnerability in the first place (Type II resilience). This metric also enables rigorous cost-benefit analysis of resilience-promoting tools.
Bundling Genetic and Financial Technologies
Drawing on a four-year study in Mozambique and Tanzania, Professor Carter highlighted the power of innovative technology bundles pairing drought-tolerant maize (genetic innovation) with index-based insurance (financial innovation).
The results were striking:
- Farmers with the bundle reduced cumulative losses dramatically.
- Treated farmers not only recovered from shocks but invested more, increasing adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies.
- The resilience dividend, additional gains from reduced fear of shocks, nearly doubled the interventions’ benefit-cost ratio.
Beyond Insurance: Improving Quality and Access
While index insurance is a cornerstone risk management tool, Professor Carter cautioned that basis risk when the index fails to match farmers’ actual losses remains a critical challenge. His team is advancing solutions such as:
- Improved remote sensing and yield estimation.
- Better-defined insurance zones.
- Fail-safe audit systems to ensure payouts when needed.
- Designing contracts that “speak to” farmers’ realities and can serve as leverage for capital access.
Tackling Sharecropping’s Productivity Trap
Shifting focus to Ethiopia, Professor Carter examined the share-cropping productivity gap farmers produce significantly less on sharecropped land compared to owned land. Despite this inefficiency, sharecropping persists because it helps farmers manage liquidity and risk constraints. His team is piloting an innovative approach: insured fixed-rent loans that provide tenant farmers with the capital to transition from sharecropping to fixed-rent arrangements, backed by index insurance and minimum income guarantees. This aims to boost productivity while protecting farmers from adverse shocks.
Looking Ahead
The webinar concluded with a call to action: cost-effective risk management innovations, especially when bundled, can catalyze inclusive agricultural transformation. But to truly achieve resilience-plus, researchers, policymakers, and development actors must invest in improving insurance quality, integrating financial and technological innovations, and addressing structural barriers such as sharecropping. As Professor Carter put it, “removing the fear of shocks is as important as removing the shocks themselves”. The RCA’s ongoing work in this space will therefore be critical in ensuring Africa’s smallholder farmers are not just surviving, but thriving in a changing climate. The RCA is open to suitable and interested researchers across Africa. The call for membership will be launched soon!
About the Keynote speaker
Prof. Michael R. Carter is a distinguished professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis and honorary professor of economics at the University of Cape Town. Carter is director of the RIF and former director of the MRR Innovation Lab. Author of numerous scientific publications, Carter’s current research projects examine poverty dynamics and productive social safety nets, evaluation of interventions to boost small farm uptake of improved technologies, and feature a suite of projects that design, pilot and evaluate index insurance contracts as mechanisms to alleviate chronic poverty and deepen agricultural and rural financial markets. Carter is an elected fellow of NBER (the National Bureau of Economic Research), BREAD (Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development) and the American Agricultural Economics Association. He has conducted several projects across Africa.
About the Moderator (RCA Lead)
Dr. Mercy F Salami (Senior Lecturer, Department of Agricultural Economics and Farm Management, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria). Her main area of research has been in Development Economics. Under this major research area, she focuses more on issues of gender, climate change, land economics and governance, poverty, food security, and nutrition and, impact assessment, with a special focus on Nigeria
For more information about the Innovating Resilience: Advancing Inclusive Agricultural Innovation for Climate Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa’ RCA and other AfricaLics RCAs, please click on following link https://africalics.org/thematic-areas/