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
This report provides a synthesis of all findings and information generated through a “stocktaking” process that involved a desk study of Prolinnova documents and evaluation reports, a questionnaire to 40 staff members of international organizations in agricultural research and development (ARD),...
The Agricultural Innovation Program (AIP), funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Pakistan, aims to increase agricultural productivity and the income of farmers in four sectors (cereals, livestock, vegetables, and horticulture) by increasing the use of...
This synthesis report presents the outputs of the workshop organised by CTA at its headquarters in Wageningen, The Netherlands, 15-17 July 2008. The outputs are presented in two main parts, each corresponding to one of the workshop objectives, and ends with a...
Grants for agricultural innovation are common but grant funds specifically targeted to smallholder farmers remain relatively rare. Nevertheless, they are receiving increasing recognition as a promising venue for agricultural innovation. They stimulate smallholders to experiment with improved practices, to become...
La lutte contre la malnutrition constitue un enjeu majeur de développement, longtemps négligé. C’est pourquoi la France, aux côtés de nombreux autres bailleurs, a pris des engagements internationaux pour lutter contre la malnutrition. La sous-nutrition ne concerne pas seulement les...