More and more, development organizations are under pressure to demonstrate that their programs result in significant and lasting changes in the well-being of their intended beneficiaries. However, such "impacts" are often the product of a confluence of events for which no single agency or group of agencies can realistically claim full credit. As a result, assessing development impacts is problematic, yet many organizations continue to struggle to measure results far beyond the reach of their programs
Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis (PIPA) is a practical approach to planning, monitoring and evaluation, developed for use with complex research-for-development projects. PIPA begins with a participatory workshop where stakeholders make explicit their assumptions about how their project will make an impact, and produce an ‘Outcomes logic model’ and an ‘Impact logic model’. These two logic models provide an ex-ante framework of predictions of impact that can also be used in priority setting and ex-post impact assessment.
This chapter examines empirical results of evaluation reports from the AfrED database in order to unpack the relationship between the demand for evaluations and the capacities needed to meet that demand. The analysis further explores ways in which current M&E training and education provision can be enhanced to respond to capacity development needs. In achieving its objectives, the chapter also draws evidence from a secondary analysis of the results of a survey of evaluation practitioners’ perceptions of ECD challenges in the sector.
Agricultural innovation is an essential component in achieving the SDG and accelerating the transition to more sustainable and resilient farming systems across the world. Innovations generally emerge from collective intelligence and action, which requires effective agricultural innovation systems (AIS). An AIS perspective has been widely adopted, but the analysis of AIS, especially at country level, remains a challenge. The need for and potential of a diagnostic tool for AIS analysis is currently receiving attention in the global agricultural policy debate.
Within agricultural innovation systems (AIS), various stakeholder groups inevitably interpret ‘innovation’ from their own vantage point of privilege and power. In rural developing areas where small-scale and subsistence farming systems support livelihoods, dominant policy actors often focus heavily on participatory modernization and commercialization initiatives to enhance productivity, access, and quality. However, existing social hierarchies may undermine the potential of such initiatives to promote inclusive and sustainable farmer-driven innovation.
Innovation is often presented as one of the main catalysts for more sustainable and inclusive development. In the agricultural and food sectors, innovation is characterized not only by specificities arising from its relationship to nature, but also from the wide diversity of its stakeholders, ranging from farmers to consumers, and including intermediaries such as the research community and advisory services. Innovation emerges from interactions between these actors, who mobilize resources and produce knowledge in collaborative mechanisms in orderto generate changes.
The cassava system in Nigeria is developing, with increasing attention to its potential positive outcomes. However, credit access is a major problem in expanding productive activities of the different actors across the value chains of cassava products. This study investigates the extent of access to credit by cassava actors with respect to the different financial institutions in the country using data obtained from a sample of 168 actors, including producers, processors, marketers, fabricators and end users
The objective of this article is to increase the understanding of the indicator landscape and to complement the various stages of the innovation process with relevant indicators. In doing so, this study categorizes the identified indicators into company-specific and contextual dimensions. Furthermore, this study analyzes the indicators in terms of their potential for ex-ante and ex-post evaluation and investigates the characteristics of relevant publications. The analysis finds that more process rather than product indicators exist in the literature.
Adoptions of improved technologies and production practices are important drivers of agricultural development in low-income countries like Nepal. Adopting a broad class of such technologies and practices is often critical for meeting the multifaceted goals of efficiency, profitability, environmental sustainability, and climate resilience.
Esta revisión de la literatura muestra la diversidad de puntos de vista en la caracterización del AIS (visión estructural, visión funcional, visión ba-sada en procesos, visión basada en capacidades). Estas diferentes visiones del AIS se basan en diferentes hipótesis y abarcan diferentes métodos de análisis del AIS. Los académicos consideran que estos puntos de vista son complementarios y útiles para una evaluación operativa del AIS. Debido a esta multiplicidad de puntos de vista analíticos, se ha desarrollado un gran número de métodos.