ANNUAL REPORT Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security, Policy Research, Capacity and Influence

Executive Summary Activities and Successes The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Security Policy Research, Capacity, & Influence (PRCI) successfully navigated a tremendously challenging first year of operation in the midst of a global pandemic, managing to make major adjustments to its way of doing business while effectively implementing the core processes needed to put each of the partner centers in charge of their own capacity development – a central goal of PRCI. With COVID-19 disrupting activities from March, 2020, the Lab implemented all elements of its workplan, including competitive selection of three Centers for Policy Leadership; launch of the STAAARS+ program training and research and the Core Center research program, both with strong mentoring of local researchers; launch of PICA, the Lab’s institutional capacity strengthening program; selection of Asian lead centers and initiation of collaboration with them and more junior centers in the region; and launch of its webinar series with six webinars during the year. Gender featured strongly in multiple pieces of the work. Going beyond its workplan, partly in response to COVID-19, the Lab undertook three very ambitious and entirely unanticipated activities: design and implementation of a Core Center technical training program with all materials available online; design and launch of a Special Topics training technical program that will segue to a research program in Year 2; and assistance to ReNAPRI to carry out a highly interactive five-year strategic planning exercise. In keeping with the challenges of COVID-19, all this work was delivered online. PRCI met or exceeded four of its five agreed indicators and, at the end of Year 1, added two additional indicators in consultation with its AOR. Selected CPLs were BAME from Senegal (l’Institut sénégalais de recherches Agricoles (ISRA) / Bureau d’analyses macro-économiques), CPEEL/DAERD from Nigeria (Center for Petroleum, Energy Economics and Law / Department of Agricultural Extension and Rural Development – University of Ibadan), and EPRC from Uganda (Economic Policy Research Center). All three won competitive bids for mentored research support during Year 1, along with Sokoine University of Agriculture, and 20 center researchers were paired with seven mentors from MSU and IFPRI. Two CPL teams – from BAME and EPRC – won competitive proposals as STAAARS+ fellows, and were joined by teams from Bahir Dar University IDRM in Ethiopia and African School of Economics in Togo. Eight mentors from Cornell, MSU, and Syracuse University were paired with these researchers. Both the Core Center and STAAARS+ teams made strong progress on their research with typically bi-weekly or at least monthly meetings with mentors. Core Center research teams engaged in nine training modules designed to prepare them for their research, and STAAARS+ teams engaged in six modules and intensive interactions across teams. In Asia, Kasetsart University worked with the PRCI Asia lead to organize and present three 2-hour trainings on trade flow analysis related to COVID, which will segue into mentored research in Year 2. PRCI also won a $200,000 buy-in for a cross-country cellphone survey of citizen experience with COVID and its impact on their livelihoods and access to food.