A rapid increase in aquaculture production in Bangladesh has lowered fish prices, increased protein consumption, and reduced poverty. The Making of a Blue Revolution in Bangladesh offers a valuable case study of how this transformation in the fish value chain has occurred and how it has improved the lives of...

As our land remains under water during the rainy season, our ancestors were already thinking of ways to produce crops in order to survive. They invented the floating garden by using crop residues. We do not need any chemical fertilizers or pesticides, because the floating bed is fertile by nature....

The Smallholder Farmers’ Dataportrait of the ESA Small Family Farms Team is a comprehensive, systematic and standardized data set on the profile of smallholder farmers, bringing out the characteristics of family farms across the world. It is designed in such a way that differences between countries and regions can be...

Read the latest publication by Tropical Agriculture Platform – Capacity Development for Agricultural Innovation Systems (TAP-CDAIS) project on stories of change. This relates to many stories of personal change, organizational change, changes in attitudes, changes in practice and improvements in livelihoods. Some examples of rich learning experiences started with the...

Rice-fish systems are common in many South and Southeast Asian countries as well as some areas of Africa. The systems are diverse, spanning capture fisheries and aquaculture, with fish and rice growing concurrently in rice fields and canals or, alternatively, fish raised between rice crops. FISH has developed several approaches to...

Women in rural Bangladesh rarely get an opportunity to work outside their homes and earn their own income. Now hundreds of thousands of women are being employed on construction sites across the country, helping to build and maintain infrastructure in their communities whilst working their way out of poverty.

Families living in the world’s largest refugee camp this week received the first 2,500 stoves and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cylinders that are part of a United Nations project to protect the environment and build resilience for people living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The “SAFE Plus” (Safe Approaches to Fuel and...

While there has been an unprecedented achievement in poverty reduction in the last three decades, eradicating extreme poverty and halving poverty by 2030 are still two of our greatest challenges. Today, about 767 million people continue to live in extreme poverty. Roughly, two thirds of the extreme poor live in...

With grafting, a young shoot from a preferred mango variety is attached to a seedling. The seedling will develop the root and base of the tree. This is called the rootstock. The young shoot that is grafted onto the rootstock is called the scion. This will develop into the canopy....

This factsheet contributes to FAO Organizational Strategic Objective 1 "Eradicate hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition", Strategic Objective 2 "Increase and improve provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner", and Strategic Objective 3 "Reduce rural poverty". The purpose of this factsheet is to briefly...

Ms. Shazada Begum, President of Kendrio Krishak Moitree (KKM) and Vice President of the Asian Farmers’ Association (AFA), has been honoured with the “RTV Alokito Nari 2017″ (Enlightened Woman) award. This is one of the most prestigious awards in Bangladesh that honours change makers like Shazada.

Located in the extreme southeastern part of the country, the districts that comprise the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) are both geographically and socio-culturally distinct from the rest of Bangladesh. Food insecurity is both chronic and widespread, and nutrition levels are among the lowest in the country. In 2013, FAO began activities in CHT...

In poor households in Bangladesh, women participate in aquaculture much less than men. To increase women’s involvement, the USAID-funded Aquaculture for Income and Nutrition project has introduced gill nets, which enable women to quickly and easily harvest small fish from their household pond. This has helped increase households' access to...

Past agricultural mechanization efforts in Ghana and Nigeria have focused more on the styles of machinery used in western countries or Latin America, where average farm sizes are much larger. While West African countries, particularly Ghana, are still relatively land abundant compared to Bangladesh, seeking the right balance across various...

Across the developing world, rural women play a crucial role in agriculture and farming. And Bangladesh, where women exceed 50 percent of the agricultural labour force, is no exception. So it’s no surprise that much of FAO’s work in the country has focused on supporting rural women farmers across a variety...

The overall objective of the ER+ component is to assist ultra-poor women and their families in disaster-prone areas of Bangladesh in lifting themselves above the lower poverty line toward greater food security. To achieve the objective, a third “promotional” year has been introduced to ER, during which women—either ER laborers/trainees...

De-centralized knowledge service is vital for empowering the knowledge deprived poor people. Aiming to provide contextualized and localized knowledge for the poor communities and developing a channel of reliable information for its various clients, Practical ActionBangladesh promotes grass root Knowledge Centres called GyanerHaat.

Farmers face great difficulties with drying their seeds because seed absorbs moisture from the soil. As a result, seed quality deteriorates, and no-one can expect good yields by using poor quality seed. In this video you can see how farmers of Maria village solved this problem. Now they are no...

The article describes a community based seed enterprise for rice seeds, set up as part of a project in the Kurigram region of Bangladesh. The enterprise generates income for the seed growers, processors and traders, but the seed is also cheaper than other seed on the market because of the...

The two studies in this report explore these issues further using empirical quantitative surveys as well as qualitative fieldwork from a cross-section of developing economies in South and SouthEast Asia. The first study is an empirical investigation of the digital gender divide amongst the poor (broadly called the Bottom of...