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Research

Research for development

Ongoing research work exemplifies this emphasis and illustrates the Challenge Program on Water and Food’s mix of site-specificity, scaling-up to the river basin level, and the production of International Public Goods. Thus, CPWF supports and conducts research that is a mixture of basic, applied, and adaptive research linked to dissemination of results. CPWF research occurs at three main levels of analysis. :

At its broadest scale, the CPWF emphasizes research at thematic and geographical levels. The Challenge Program’s Themes provide focus to ensure that research carried out addresses those disciplinary areas where CPWF believes it will achieve the greatest water productivity impact. CPWF Benchmark Basins serve as real-life laboratories within which its research is conducted and where its outputs will eventually be applied and achieve impact.

Research Priorities

The Comprehensive Assessment (CA) of Water Management in Agriculture  delivers key input into the CPWF's research priority setting process. The research priorities identified by the CA can be found here. You can also visit the Comprehensive Assessment website.

Research Activities

Basin Focal Projects

The 10 Basin Focal Projects, and one BFP coordination project, add value to individual research projects' outputs, yielding deeper understanding of water poverty and water productivity at the basin level.

Competitive Call Projects

CPWF's first competitive call for project proposals yielded a portfolio of 50 high quality projects, of which, 33 currently receive funding. In 2007, the Program issued a second call for competitive projects, resulting in an additional eight exciting new ventures.

Small Grants for Impact Projects

These 14 projects aimed to identify existing local community water and/or agricultural management strategies or technologies that had the potential to improve agricultural water productivity at a higher, broader scale. Most projects concluded in 2007, with many encouraging results from the initiative successfully workshopped with small producers around the developing world.

Synthesis

The Challenge Program on Water and Food deals with complex, diverse and dynamic systems for which there are a growing number of stakeholders generating information. Synthesis research is needed to make sense of the large body of dispersed and disciplinary literature and data that accumulates over time, and to package it in ways that meet the needs of different users.

Knowledge Sharing in Research project

Appropriate and effective knowledge sharing is important across all the CGIAR centers and their partners, and the Challenge Program on Water and Food are working toward a better understanding and wider utilization of knowledge sytems, knowledge sharing approaches, and innovation mechanisms in research for development. Committed to the dissemination of research outputs from its projects, the CPWF is a strong contributor to the Knowledge Sharing and Innovation project.