Performance Evaluation Report Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Assets and Market Access (AMA IL)

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the Assets and Market Access Innovation Lab (AMA IL) to advance knowledge and understanding of development approaches and technologies in order to increase rural households’ ability to acquire, protect, and effectively utilize productive assets. This evaluation assessed AMA IL’s overall program performance across five themes: research quality; outreach and dissemination; policy; capacity building; program management; and future directions. The evaluation focused on generating evidence to guide programmatic and policy decisions. The Evaluation Team (ET) used a mixed methods approach that included site visits to Ghana and Tanzania; 77 key informant interviews with key stakeholder groups, and nine focus group discussions— eight with community members and one with extension agents in Ghana. The results show that AMA IL supported high-quality and relevant research for strengthening the resilience of smallholder farming households across diverse topics, countries, and sectors. The ET found that the management entity is well positioned to support the research and to oversee a program as dynamic as AMA IL, and systematically build a valuable evidence base around new approaches and technologies to increase rural household resilience. However, the outreach and dissemination components, as well as the capacity building of local researchers and institutions, were lagging. The ET recommends that AMA IL further synthesize and consolidate lessons learned on the new technologies it supports across countries and develop a strategy for local research capacity building and awareness raising among stakeholders towards broad adoption and policy impact