In West Africa, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) works with multi-disciplinary Results for Development (R4D) partners in selected communities located in Northern Ghana and Southern Mali. More particularly, in Southern Mali the AR-WA project focuses on sorghum-millet-legume-vegetable-livestock systems in the Bougouni, Yanfolila and Koutiala districts, which are situated in the Sikasso region. The Africa RISING partners in Mali include several international institutions: the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC), the International Center for Research in Agroforestry or World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF); as well as local partners: L’Association Malienne d’Eveil et de Développement Durable (AMEDD), L'Association Malienne pour la Sécurité et la Souveraineté Alimentaires (AMASSA), Mouvement Biologique du Mali (MOBIOM).

This dataset describes the agricultural practices within households interviewed as part of Baseline Study of Food for Peace Title II Development Food Assistance Program in the Maradi and Zinder regions in Niger. In fiscal year 2012, USAID's Office of Food for Peace (FFP) awarded funding to private voluntary organizations (PVOs) to design and implement a multi-year Title II development food assistance program in Niger. The main purpose of the Title II program is to improve long-term food security of chronically food insecure population in the target regions. FFP contracted a firm, ICF International to conduct a baseline study in targeted areas of the country prior to the start of the new program. The purpose of the study was to assess the current status of key indicators, have a better understanding of prevailing conditions and perceptions of the population in the implementation areas, and serve as a point of comparison for future final evaluations. Results would also be used to further refine program targeting and, where possible, to understand the relationship between variables to inform program design. The study was conducted in 2013, while FFP expects to conduct final evaluations as close as possible to the end of the program five years later. In the process of migrating data to the current DDL platform, datasets with a large number of variables required splitting into multiple spreadsheets. They should be reassembled by the user to understand the data fully.

The NASA Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments (MEaSUREs) (https://earthdata.nasa.gov/about/competitive-programs/measures) Global Food Security-support Analysis Data (GFSAD) data product provides cropland extent data over the continent of Africa for nominal year 2015 at 30 meter resolution (GFSAD30AFCE). The monitoring of global cropland extent is critical for policymaking and provides important baseline data that are used in many agricultural cropland studies pertaining to water sustainability and food security. The GFSAD30AFCE data product uses two pixel-based supervised classifiers, Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machine (SVM), and one object-oriented classifier, Recursive Hierarchical Image Segmentation (RHSEG). The classifiers retrieve cropland extent from a combination of Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-2 MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) data and elevation derived from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Version 3 data products. Each GFSAD30AFCE GeoTIFF file contains a cropland extent layer that defines areas of cropland, non-cropland, and water bodies over a 10 degree by 10 degree area.Known Issues* Known issues including constraints and limitations are provided on page 20 of the ATBD.