Newly appointed Managing Director for the Social Sciences, Joost de Laat, participated in the "Collaborative Solutions: Funding the UNCCD COP16 Flagship Initiative for Food Security and Sustainable Development" event, addressing crucial challenges ahead of the UN Summit of the Future.
De Laat contributed to one of the afternoon parallel sessions titled Financial Innovations to Facilitate Resilience and Mitigation. During the session, he presented research findings from his collaboration with a Kenyan dairy cooperative, focusing on asset collateralised lending (ACL)-a financial innovation designed to help smallholder farmers purchase essential assets, such as large water storage tanks, to boost productivity and resilience to climate change.
"This flagship event offers a tremendous opportunity to share our findings and explore how this approach can be scaled to benefit hundreds of farmer cooperatives and thousands of smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries," De Laat remarked.
Flagship initiative
The event, co-hosted by the Innovation Commission for Climate Change, Food Security, and Agriculture-chaired by Nobel Laureate Professor Michael Kremer-aims to drive a five-year flagship initiative that promotes scalable innovations to address desertification and land degradation in Africa. The Commission is hosted by the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, in partnership with the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the Arab Gulf Programme for Development (AGFUND), and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA).
The Innovation Commission brings together a high-level, independent group of leaders, including former heads of state, cabinet ministers, and key figures from international organisations and civil society. Together, they are committed to advancing evidence-based, cost-effective solutions in the most vulnerable regions of the world.
This one-day milestone event is part of the Science Summit 2024, taking place from September 10-27 in New York.
