For more than two decades, IFPRI’s research and policy analysis have been a resource for Bangladesh in making impressive strides in ensuring food security and reducing poverty. Working closely with the Bangladesh Ministry of Food and Disaster Management and its Food Planning and Monitoring Unit, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, BRAC, CARE International, and civil society organizations, IFPRI has supported Bangladesh in its goals of improving nutrition, women’s empowerment, social protection, and coping with natural disasters. IFPRI looks forward to deepening its collaboration with these and other partners through its Policy Research and Strategy Support Program and complementary initiatives, and to enhancing long-term capacity in policy analysis and evidence-based research. Such strong collaborative efforts have translated and will continue to translate research into policy action that will help accelerate Bangladesh’s progress in ending hunger and undernutrition.

For more than 40 years, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has been providing cutting-edge research and policy options on food and nutrition security to partners in donor and recipient countries around the world. IFPRI’s partners in the United Kingdom have played an especially critical role, with the Department for International Development (DFID) serving as a generous and dependable donor and partner to IFPRI since 1984.

More than two decades of strong partnership between the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) began with a shared goal of creating more effective and efficient food aid distribution systems. Our work helped improve the delivery of essential food aid to the most vulnerable in times of crisis, inform decisions to administer food or cash transfers using sound evidence, and strengthen evidence-based policy making by developing information systems and networks for food security. Over time, the collaboration moved toward designing social protection programs that use food and cash transfers to improve nutrition for the poor. More recently, our partnership has contributed to helping vulnerable people become more resilient to shocks and crises and to moving countries toward pathways of long-term growth, prosperity, and Zero Hunger. This brochure presents highlights of the IFPRI-WFP partnership.

Highlights of IFPRI’s current cutting-edge, policy-relevant research in Central, East, South, and Southeast Asia are featured in this brochure. IFPRI works with partners throughout Asia to contribute to effective policies, programs, and investments that help ensure all people have access to safe, sufficient, nutritious, and sustainably grown food across the continent.

EC financial support has helped to ensure that IFPRI’s research remains responsive, innovative, and effective in tackling the obstacles that stand in the way of achieving food security and poverty alleviation. Over the years, the EC’s support to IFPRI provided the necessary foundation for cuttingedge research in areas such as climate change; biofuels; and the nexus of agriculture, nutrition, and health. This support has helped IFPRI partner with strategic European partners in civil society, higher education, and public sector areas, with a focus on making food security research accessible through the development of global public goods, capacity-building networks, and technological platforms. In June 2015, IFPRI, the EC, and the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) joined together to bring experts and stakeholders to discuss the latest thinking on sustainably improving livelihoods and welfare at a Brussels workshop, “Improving Food Systems for Better Lives.” The workshop highlighted the need for greater convergence among diverse actors, sectors, and stakeholders for the development and implementation of innovative solutions that will improve food systems and enhance food and nutrition security around the world.

This paper evaluates the influence and impact that IFPRI research and related activities had on the initiation, evolution, and impact of the food for education (FFE) program in Bangladesh. It reviews the outputs from the IFPRI program and summarizes the perceptions of various stakeholders about the value and influence of these on the FFE program. A novel experimental evaluation methodology is used on household sample survey data to analyze the effects of FFE on schooling outcomes. Earnings functions are then estimated using national household income and expenditure survey data to assess the effect of schooling on earnings. Combining the two, the effects of the increased participation and duration of schooling (due to the FFE program) on lifetime earnings of children are derived. Using these incremental earnings figures, the internal rates of return for both national and private investments in the FFE program are estimated. From these, a conservative assessment of the economic value of IFPRI's contribution to the generation of the national benefits is made... We conclude that a very conservative assessment of the economic value of IFPRI's contribution to the generation of the national benefits estimated above is that the FFE program began one year earlier than it might have without the IFPRI input. Based upon the total cost of the IFPRI-FFE research program of US$151,000, the internal rate of return on this research investment ranges from 64-96 percent. of all the other benefits are added to this, clearly the IFPRI contribution has been an outstanding economic investment. These benefits might have been even greater had IFPRI had an explicit communications strategy with more timely and available publications, along with appropriate advocacy based upon a more thorough knowledge of the dynamic political economy of government decision making in Bangladesh." -- from Authors' Abstract