Tackling seasonal hunger and poverty in northeastern Nigeria
Blog: how ATAI evidence inspired the Taimaka Project approach and continues to inform their plans to scale
Farmers in Gombe State, Nigeria gather at a local school for the final stage of enrollment in the Taimaka Project’s post-harvest loan program. (Credit: Parth Ahya)
In this blog post, ATAI Senior Program Manager Leah Bridle speaks with Taimaka co-founders Parth Ahya, Justin Graham, Muhammad Uba, and Abubakar Umar about Taimaka’s approach to applying research evidence, and their progress to date.
Taimaka means “help” in Hausa, a language spoken in northern Nigeria, and is the name of a new organization founded to do just that: combine the rigor of academic research with the dynamism of a startup to help reduce seasonal hunger and poverty of smallholder farmers in Gombe State, Nigeria. Based on evidence from an ATAI-funded study by Marshall Burke, Lauren Falcao-Bergquist, and Ted Miguel, the Taimaka Project team helps farmers access improved crop storage (PICS bags for crop storage), and offers post-harvest loans to help farmers wait to sell their crops when prices rise. Their goal is to increase the incomes of extremely poor households by 20%, measuring their progress and impacts as they scale operations.
For more information on their work, or to get in touch with the Taimaka team, visit taimaka.org
