Opportunities at, or through, EPRU will be listed here as and when they are available.
-
SPIA-Nigeria Country Study: Call for Proposals
Applications must be received by: 2025-07-10
As part of its capacity-building mission, the SPIA-Nigeria country study team is pleased to announce a call for proposals to support MSc, PhD, and early-career researchers who conduct empirical research on Nigeria's agricultural sector. The SPIA-Nigeria country study is a three-year research program, spanning January 2025 – December 2027, aiming to investigate the reach, adoption, and impact of CGIAR-promoted innovations in Nigeria over the past 20 years (2005- 2025). CGIAR, the Consortium for International Agricultural Research, is an international partnership focused on research for food security and the sustainable transformation of food, land, and water systems. The Special Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA) generously funds the study. The country study is jointly implemented by EfD-South Africa, based at the University of Cape Town, and EfD-Nigeria, based at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Professors Yonas Alem and Amin Karimu lead the program as PIs.
As part of its capacity-building objective, the team proposes small grants to support master's students (USD 1,500), PhD students (USD 3,000), and early-career fellows (USD 8,000) in their research based on large-scale data sets from Nigeria. While applicants can be based anywhere in the world, the proposed research should primarily focus on Nigeria
The team will announce the grant winners by the end of July, and the grant recipients are expected to submit a first draft of the paper by December 15, 2025. Grant winners will also be required to present the paper in a policy-oriented academic workshop organized by the research team.
The proposed study must use large-scale farm household dataset(s) from Nigeria, possibly in combination with other data sources, and focus on the uptake and possible impact of modern agricultural technologies, particularly those promoted by CGIAR institutions.
Examples of eligible themes are:
- Diffusion of innovations: to document adoption pathways using two or more survey rounds, focusing on individual innovations or comparisons across innovations.
- Adoption: to understand among whom and where the adoption of different innovations occurs to generate evidence relevant to targeting, scaling policies, etc.
- Synergies and trade-offs between innovations: to understand linkages between the adoption of different innovations and their benefits.
- Analysis of farm/household level decision-making and outcomes as they relate to various agricultural innovations.
- Relationship between agricultural innovations and community/regional level developments, including, e.g., questions on structural transformation.
- Varietal-level data: if you have access to DNA fingerprinting, the varietal identification dataset of different crops at the national level. You can use this unique dataset to exploit and shed new light on several questions.
- Analysis of measurement error: to provide evidence on best practices across a range of commonly used methods for measuring agricultural innovations.
To see more information about the desired proposals, as well as the link to submit them, please download the full call for proposals here