This piece examines the prevailing thinking and trends in evaluation (specifically impact assessment), which is important for understanding how a contest of ideas has become something of a battleground in the quest for better evidence. It is particularly Impact assessment and the quest for the Holy Grail Common Fund for Commodities relevant for the many organisations, including CFC, who desire methodological rigour in their evaluations and yet have to be realistic when it comes to evaluation budgets. 

Using household survey data from Ethiopia, this paper evaluates the impact of agricultural cooperatives on smallholders’ technical efficiency. The authors used propensity score matching to compare the average difference in technical efficiency between cooperative member farmers and similar independent farmers. The results show that agricultural cooperatives are effective in providing support services that significantly contribute to members’ technical efficiency.

This paper shares the first results of an ongoing collaborative action research in which ten development organisations explored different Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) approaches with the aim of dealing more effectively with complex processes of social change. There are four reasons why we think this paper may be of interest: 1) The paper illustrates a practical example of action research whereby the organisations themselves are becoming the researchers.

This article studies the impact of innovation platforms in Tanga Region, Tanzania, set up by the MilkIT dairy development project to intensify smallholder production through feed enhancement and value chain approaches. The conceptual framework used builds up from three socio-economic theories. The Structure-Conduct-Performance model of markets contributes its elegant assumption, linking the way markets are organized with how market actors behave, which has an influence on market performance.

The Capacity Development Results Framework (CDRF or the Framework) is a powerful new approach to the design, implementation, monitoring, management, and evaluation of development programs. Originally conceived to address well-documented problems in the narrow field of capacity development, the Framework can be profitably applied to assess the feasibility and coherence of proposed development projects, to monitor projects during implementation (with a view to taking corrective action), or to assess the results, or even the design, of completed projects. 

The Conceptual Background provides an in-depth analysis of the conceptual underpinnings and principles of the TAP Common Framework. It is also available in French and Spanish.

This book documents a unique series of 19 case studies where agricultural biotechnologies were used to serve the needs of smallholders in developing countries. They cover different regions, production systems, species and underlying socio-economic conditions in the crop (seven case studies), livestock (seven) and aquaculture/fisheries (five) sectors. Most of the case studies involve a single crop, livestock or fish species and a single biotechnology.

Feeding an additional three billion people over the next four decades, along with providing food security for another one billion people that are currently hungry or malnourished, is a huge challenge. Meeting those goals in a context of land and water scarcity, climate change, and declining crop yields will require another giant leap in agricultural innovation. The aim of this paper is to stimulate a dialogue on what new approaches might be needed to meet these needs and how innovative funding mechanisms could play a role.

In sub-Saharan Africa, there is increasing interest for the adaptation and use of the innovation systems approach to advance learning and development in the Agricultural Research and Development (ARD) sector. This crave is constrained by unavailability of a proven blue print that describe the paradigm shift from the linear approach and how such could function under different socio-economic, cultural and political climate.

This paper analyzes the impact of participation in multi-stakeholder platforms (Plataformas) aimed at linking smallholder potato farmers to the market in the mountain region of Ecuador. It describes and evaluates the Plataformas’ program to determine whether it has been successful in linking farmers to higher-value markets and the effects that such connections have brought, particularly with regard to farmers’ welfare and to the environment. The analysis is run comparing a set of different and carefully constructed control groups to beneficiaries and using various specifications.