Regions:
Asia, Europe and Eurasia, Global, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, US and Canada

Related Key Topics:
Capacity Building, Climate Change, Food Security, Gender, Health and Nutrition, Innovation, Markets, Natural Resource Management, Policy, Productivity

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Assets and Market Access (Feed the Future BASIS Assets and Market Access Innovation Lab) develops policies and programs that broaden the base of economic growth for the rural poor through an asset-based approach. BASIS AMA seeks to improve the rural poor’s access to resources and quality of life through policy-relevant research that builds the capacity of local research institutions. The BASIS AMA Innovation Lab has worked in Asia, Europe and Eurasia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In its most recent phase the BASIS AMA Innovation Lab’s research focused on five major thematic areas including: insurance and risk management; smallholder access to markets and improved technologies; access to finance; asset building and pathways from poverty. The Innovation Lab developed market mediated index-based insurance products. These products are designed to alleviate the negative effects experienced by smallholder farmers and livestock keepers when they lose assets as a result of climate-related impacts. The economic shocks that result from asset loss can reduce smallholders’ resilience, productivity, and economic well-being. The BASIS AMA Innovation Lab supported research in Bangladesh and Uganda to examine the gender dimensions of these processes, studying men’s and women’s asset accumulation and the implications for social protection.

Integrating livestock and market access, the earlier BASIS CRSP worked in collaboration with the Global Livestock (GL) CRSP in northern Kenya to increase pastoralists’ access to natural resources, diversify income and assets, and create market linkages for pastoralists. BASIS AMA also partners with government and non-governmental organizations like USAID, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Micro-Insurance Innovation Facility of the International Labour Organization, and Oxfam America. Capacity building is also achieved through the support of long-term degree trainees from 45 different countries including the US in fields such as Anthropology, Agricultural Economics, and Agroforestry.

The BASIS AMA Innovation Lab’s management entity was based at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 1996 through 2012. After a competitive process, it was awarded to the University of California, Davis in 2012. The BASIS AMA Innovation Lab is led by Michael Carter.