The year 2020 was a year of unprecedented challenges. A number of climate-related disasters, such as heavy rains and locust swarms in Eastern Africa and drought across much of the arid Sahel, were outweighed by the global catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic. The accumulation of regional and global catastrophes in a single year show how fragile the development community’s successes have really been. 

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience at UC Davis has the increasing importance of resilience at all levels, from systems to individual families, at the very center of its research program. Launched in July in 2019 by USAID, the lab builds upon a foundation of field studies and theoretical work to help families and communities build resilience to perennial threats like drought but also against unforeseen shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also testing how resilience itself can generate additional returns through a well-established phenomenon we call Resilience+. 

In our first year, we have launched twelve projects alongside two ongoing studies. This work represents some of the best ideas and innovations related to rural markets, agricultural risk and broadly based resilience. Two of these launched in a rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of these projects is field testing ideas to learn if they address challenges rural families face while building the knowledge, experience and networks needed to scale up each success.

We have also been strengthening the network of researchers and organizations at work on these critical challenges. In August we launched the Advancing Local Leadership, Innovation and Networks (ALL IN) initiative that meets a high and growing demand for research funding among African researchers while increasing the capacity of African research institutions. We expect that leveraging local host-country research leadership will generate local solutions to major development challenges with an established pathway toward having an impact on national policy making. 

In this rapidly changing field of development, the consistent thread is an increasing need to make families, communities and systems resilient to a wide range of shocks, both perennial and unforeseen. A research program like ours will only become more critical, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic is forecasted to undermine some of the progress in development made over the past decade. At the same time, the insights we as a research community are generating on the promise of building assets and providing a reliable and sustainable safety net will help us to rebuild faster and stronger.