HarvestChoice Labs

Sweet potato is not a relative of potato, nor yam. In fact, they are all very different – yet even researchers often get confused and publish improperly aggregated data. Here are some useful facts about sweet potato – one of the most important and nutritious crops commonly found in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Cassava is one of the most important staple crops in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet it stands out from other crops in many ways. In fact, cassava has been even imposing challenges for us to analyze its production data and modeling growth and productivity. This post briefly explains why.

The spatial team broke new ground first in negotiating access to many previously unavailable national poverty maps (based on national poverty lines) and then, while acknowledging significant conceptual and methodological issues remain, constructing the first sub-national poverty map of the developing world (headcount ratios and absolute numbers of poor people at $1.25 and $2.00 PPP 2005 poverty lines). These maps were constructed using over 24,000 sub-national data points for the developing world. Work continues to improve them further, particularly in SSA, and more recent or higher spatial resolution data is currently being added for another 10 countries in West and Central Africa (scheduled for completion in 2011).