Molly Knapp (she/her) is a Global Human Development master’s candidate specializing in program design and evaluation and social innovation. She is passionate about facilitating cross-sectoral collaboration to drive social impact and sustainable, locally led development. Before Georgetown, she spent five years managing USAID-funded democracy, human rights, and governance programs with Democracy International. Her proudest moments include supporting a peaceful 2023 election in Liberia, strengthening community resilience between Venezuelan migrants and Trinidadian host communities, and promoting community dialogue between municipal officials and constituents in post-conflict Kosovo. Molly’s interest in agricultural livelihoods emerged during the 2025 Global Social Innovation Lab (GSIL) Pitch Competition, where her team won first place for its last-mile crop transportation innovation for smallholder farmers in India. Molly has extensive experience working with migrant populations, having conducted program evaluations for UNICEF Sudan’s humanitarian aid programs, supported immigration cases as a litigation paralegal, and taught ESL to recently arrived students from Latin America.
Measuring the Impact of Environmental Drivers on Durable Solutions for Displaced Farmers
Climate change has significantly impacted quinoa farmers in Peru – 40% of whom are Indigenous women – and cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, where up to 70% of the labor force is female. Climate change in the form of more frequent droughts, soil erosion, and natural disasters forces many to abandon their lands, and it will continue to pose significant challenges to agricultural sustainability, necessitating durable solutions to support those farmers. As defined by the IASC Framework for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), durable solutions include return, resettlement elsewhere, and local reintegration. My research project proposes the following question: To what extent do different environmental drivers affect durable solutions for displaced women farmers? I study whether slow-onset (e.g., soil erosion) and sudden-onset (e.g., natural disaster) environmental drivers cause farmers to have different long-term responses to displacement. Temporally, I will examine slow-onset environmental drivers from 2024 onwards and sudden-onset environmental drivers in the context of the 2015-2016 El Niño Event in Peru and the 2016-2017 drought in Côte d’Ivoire. The gap my research is filling is how climate change complicates – or not – how and why certain people seek certain solutions to displacement. While IDPs are well studied, displaced farmers affected by climate change are not. While environmental factors are acknowledged as influencing internal displacement33, there is a lack of targeted research on how environmental drivers specifically affect the choice among durable solutions for displaced populations.