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Research

CPWF practices research for development. Ongoing research work exemplifies this emphasis and illustrates the Challenge program’s mix of site-specificity, scaling up to the basin level, and the production of international public goods. Thus, CPWF funds and conducts research that is a mixture of basic, applied, and adaptive research linked to dissemination of results. CPWF research occurs at three main levels of analysis. :

At its broadest scale, the CPWF emphasizes research at thematic and geographical levels. The Challenge Program’s themes provide focus to ensure that research carried out addresses those disciplinary areas where CPWF believes it will achieve the greatest water productivity impact. CPWF benchmark basins serve as real-life laboratories within which its research is conducted and where its outputs will eventually be applied and achieve impact.

Research Priorities

The Comprehensive Assessment (CA) of Water Management in Agriculture  delivers key input into the CPWF's research priority setting process. The research priorities identified by the CA can be found here

Visit the Comprehensive Assessment website

Research Activities

Basin Focal Projects

The basin focal projects add value to individual research project outputs, and yield knowledge about water poverty and water productivity at the basin level.

Competitive Call Projects

CPWF's first competitive call for project proposals yielded a portfolio of 50 high quality projects, of which, 33 currently receive funding.

Small Grant Programs

These projects aim to identify existing small-scale or local-level water and/or agricultural management strategies or technologies that have the potential to improve agricultural water productivity at some wider scale.

Synthesis

The Challenge Program on Water and Food deals with complex, diverse and dynamic systems for which there are a growing number of stakeholders generating information. Synthesis research is needed to make sense of the large body of dispersed and disciplinary literature and data that accumulates over time, and to package it in ways that meet the needs of different users.