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At 8 years old, Danielle Essandoh unearthed a fascination with agriculture and never looked back. Her grandfather, a peanut farmer, welcomed her help around the family farm, and Essandoh embraced farm life with enthusiasm. Today, as a doctoral student in the Institute of Plant Breeding, Genetics and Genomics at the University of Georgia, Essandoh remains driven by her desire to help people sustain themselves.

A woman’s work is never done, especially during the rainy season. “Who has the time? A qualitative assessment of gendered intrahousehold labor allocation, time use and time poverty in rural Senegal” takes a look at the factors impacting whether women have enough time to rest, engage in entrepreneurial activities and invest in the future. The paper, recently published in “Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems,” was authored by Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut gender specialist Jessica Marter-Kenyon, with contributing research and writing by S. Lucille Blakeley, Jacqueline Lea Banks, Codou Ndiaye and Maimouna Diop.

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut has won the Corteva Agriscience Award for Excellence in Research, an honor that recognizes an individual or team for career performance or for outstanding research of significant benefit to the peanut industry. The award is given each year at the American Peanut Research and Education Society meeting, which was held this past week in Savannah.

Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut, working with one of the leading experts in food safety training, has published a free online course to help small-scale food manufacturers – particularly those who make peanut products – create structured food safety plans. The course “Food Safety” is available at the Peanut Innovation Lab’s Groundnut Academy.

Farmers around the world grow peanuts because the plant adapts to poor soils and produces a crop even as droughts become more common. Smallholder farmers around the world grow the crop on modest plots and cook the nuts into traditional dishes or sell the crop for money to send their kids to school. On April 12, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the University of Georgia announced a five-year extension of their collaborative research and outreach work in peanut innovation.

A research project in Northern Ghana evaluated the effectiveness of a peanut-based school meal. With more structure to the school day and a guaranteed meal on the way, student attendance increased 70 percent over the previous year, and the change was even more pronounced for girls.

A partnership between the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut and Southern African Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) program brought innovation and capacity-building to scale, training 3,636 farmers in groundnut production and aflatoxin control, including 2,245 women and 363 youth. Through the collaboration – which was built on the strengths of both parties – thousands of smallholder farmers received training in Malawi (669 farmers), Mozambique (381 farmers), Zambia (1,254 farmers) and Zimbabwe (1,322 farmers).

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut, working with Scientific Animations Without Borders (SAWBO) has released another animation highlighting best practices for growing peanuts. Groundnut: Preventing Aflatoxin is available on YouTube, at SAWBO and on the Peanut Innovation Lab website.

Early career success is about more than just gaining expertise in a field. A working professional has to make decisions about where to work, how to balance professional and private time and when to invest in more education. That’s why the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut works to connect graduate students with mentors and to foster useful conversations that help a scholar navigate the working world.