The Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods, and Food Security (RENEWAL) was officially launched in 2001 as a joint project of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR), and was operational in Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa through most of 2011. RENEWAL is a network of networks comprised of national networks of food and nutrition-relevant organizations, along with partners in AIDS and public health practitioners. Its overarching goal is to provide evidence-based research on the linkages between HIV, food security, and nutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa that would inform responses to prevent or mitigate the impact and consequences of AIDS. RENEWALs three main objectives are: (1) to reduce critical gaps in understanding how livelihoods, particularly those deriving from agriculture, both contribute to the spread of HIV and are affected by HIV and AIDS; (2) to generate new policy-relevant knowledge on how households and communities may strengthen both their resistance to HIV transmission and their resilience to the impacts of AIDS; and (3) to enable relevant institutions (particularly governments) to generate and act upon realistic priorities for responding to the interaction of the AIDS epidemic with food and nutrition insecurity. RENEWALs strategic approach to achieving these goals involved the three core pillars of capacity strengthening, policy communications, and action research, and the synergies resulting from their interactions. This report assesses the impact of RENEWAL activities from 2000 to 2010 and is based on a review of products resulting from RENEWAL activities (such as books, policy briefs, workshop summaries, reports, and discussion papers), stakeholder perceptions of RENEWAL products and activities, and national policy or programming changes resulting from RENEWAL-supported action research, capacity strengthening efforts, and policy communications.
This report assesses the impact of IFPRI’s social-protection research program (GRP28) from 2000 to 2012 (including its predecessor, MP18). The assessment includes an extensive review of public goods produced by the program, stakeholder perceptions of the program’s public goods and research activities, case studies (Bangladesh, London, Mexico, Rome, and Washington, DC), and policy or programming changes that resulted from IFPRI-sponsored research, capacity strengthening, and research-policy linkages between 2000 and 2012. Over 40 interviews were conducted with national stakeholders, donors, IFPRI staff, government officials, and individuals who participated in or had knowledge of IFPRI’s activities regarding social protection during this timeframe. IFPRI’s social-protection research activities conducted under the GRP28 are ongoing and extend beyond the 2012 endline of this assessment. GRP28 research activities initiated during the latter part of the 12-year timeframe (that is, in 2010, 2011, or 2012) are limited or absent from this assessment if results had not been published at the time the study was initiated early in the summer of 2014.
The performance of the International Food Policy Research Institutes (IFPRIs) research program that focuses on water resource issues is reviewed for the period 19942010 around the three themes that constitute the program: global modeling, river basin modeling, and institutions. The IFPRI water team has been involved in leading-edge research in a number of dimensions: it has focused on analysis at varying geographic scales; the work has been truly interdisciplinary by engaging economics with biophysical science and other social sciences; and research outputs have been innovative in advancing institutional analysis and water pricing and in policy measures addressing the complexities of water supply management. In the research tasks, IFPRIs water team actively collaborated with a wide range of researchers from within the CGIAR network, national research institutes, and universities. Within the team, a largely stable group of leaders has been responsible for the professional development of a substantial cohort of junior staff who have moved onto successful careers elsewhere. The output of the program has been prolific and prominent in academic, policy, and development communities. The approach taken is to review selected publications from the themes; assess the quality of the journals in which papers have been published; and evaluate the performance, on average, of researchers in the program. In addition, surveys of stakeholders were carried out, and three specific projects were subjected to detailed review. The assessment demonstrated the high regard in which the program research outputs and researchers are held. The IFPRI water team has been remarkably productive throughout the 16 years considered, working on issues that are of high relevance to policy and producing work that has largely been cutting edge. However, impacts generated by individual projects were not consistently or readily identifiable. To maximize the benefits of this performance and to overcome challenges associated with securing more outcomes, this report recommends that a more coordinated approach be taken to develop the research project portfolio. This would involve better targeting of projects to policy objectives through a more systematic review of research demand forces and improved integration of research work with policy development processes. The latter in particular requires the development of a sense of research project ownership within the policy circles the research is designed to influence. More effort in the development of in-country research partnerships can aid this process as local researchers can act as champions within local policy circles. Where government agencies have a research function, their integration into the partnerships is recommended. Avoidance of completing research projects in a policy vacuum is critical but requires both advanced planning of each research project as well as constant adaptation of the work plan to (often rapidly) evolving policy contexts. To achieve project impacts beyond the immediacy of the specific case study context, a more targeted and coordinated publication strategy should be developed in light of changing publication technology. Project webpages within the IFPRI website, with readily downloadable reports, are useful during the implementation of each project and more formal papers should be targeted for publication in high-impact factor technical journals with parallel papers prepared for more policy-oriented journals that have high circulations.
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has undertaken research programs on agricultural STI policy since 1995. This study assesses the impact of this body of research outputs and support services in terms of three complementary analyses: (1) an evaluation of the potential impact of the complete body of research using implicit or explicit impact pathways, (2) two case studies that assess the actual impact of particular research outputs, and (3) a more traditional bibliometric analysis. Movement along the impact pathway, in turn, requires different types of research products—evolving from problem framing to methodology development, then to case studies, and finally to context-specific policy recommendations—all within the logical stages of the impact pathway. How far IFPRI operates along this impact pathway produces a basic tension between the CGIAR’s mandate to produce international public goods (IPGs) and the increasing focus on accountability through impact in the use of international public funds.
IFPRI’s Poverty, Health, and Nutrition Division (PHND) and the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) have conducted research since 2003 on the critical links between nutrition, health, and agriculture. This evaluation considers the impact of the work carried out through 2016, looking at the research strategy, engagement, capacity building, and impact on programs and policies and global dialogue. Findings suggest that the Diet Quality and Health of the Poor program has been successful in developing and sharing valuable research, knowledge, and data, and has brought new issues and approaches to partners and stakeholders. Through a range of projects, the program has effectively engaged with stakeholders, partners, and governments to support capacity enhancement and to help shape national interventions to improve nutrition.
Strengthening national capacities for undertaking, communicating, and using evidence-based food policy analysis has long been one of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI’s) major objectives. To that end, IFPRI has engaged in different kinds of capacity strengthening that include formal training, (policy) networks, country strategic policy support, research collaboration with individuals and organizations, institutional development, support to university degree programs, visiting fellows, and training of postdoctoral fellows.
Marking IFPRI’s 40th year, this report draws on external sources of evidence to review the Institute’s policy influence and impact to date and provides recommendations to improve. The external evidence includes citations data, external program and management reviews commissioned by CGIAR, and a series of independently conducted impact assessment studies of many of IFPRI’s research programs and projects between 1995 and 2015. The report also reviews recommendations as to how IFPRI might improve its impact.
The IFPRI 2020 Conference on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health was held in New Delhi, India, February 1012, 2011, and attracted more than 900 attendees. Conference activities included 12 plenary sessions, 15 parallel sessions, 14 side events, an ongoing knowledge fair with more than 25 exhibit booths and tables, six informal discussion groups, and roughly 30 rapid fire presentations during coffee breaks. Assessing the impact of this Conference is a task complicated by multiple issues such as assessment coverage and impact attribution. The assessment methods used here include surveys of conferees, Internet searches, website and literature searches, and extensive personal interviews. Distinctions are drawn between short-term and medium-term impacts, and also among impacts on individuals, on institutions, and on professional discourse. Impacts on individual conferees were measured through pre- and post-Conference surveys and telephone interviews. The impacts on the substantive views of those who attended the Conference were found to be small. Most conferees (75 percent) came to Delhi already convinced that a cross-sector approach to agriculture, nutrition, and health (ANH) was appropriate. At the individual level, the Conference impacted motivation and empowerment more than beliefs. The Conference gave those who attended new information, new networking opportunities, and various positioning advantages that made them more effective within their own institutions back home. Such advantages were primarily important in the short term. Regarding impacts on institutions, the 2020 Conference produced important but mixed results. Direct impacts on national governments were small, in part because ministerial structures and bureaucratic routines in governments are traditionally segregated by sector, and resistant to anything more than incremental change. Direct impacts from the 2020 Conference on private companies and NGOs were also modest, but for a different reason: these institutions are inherently comfortable working across sectors, so most of the private companies and NGOs participating in the Conference felt little need to change. The strongest institutional impacts from the Conference came within a category of organizations that wanted to integrate nutrition with agriculture, but were unsure of how, or how quickly, to move forward. These institutions included the CGIAR itself as it moved to create the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (CRP4); the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as it responded to an internal evaluation of its own work in nutrition; and a number of donor institutions including most prominently the UKs Department for International Development (DFID), which used the materials and policy energy generated by the 2020 Conference to help guide and push a major expansion of bilateral funding into the ANH arena. These DFID responses alone were a large enough payoff to mark the Conference a success. A third significant impact from the Conference was on professional discourse. The 2020 Conference helped change the conversation about agriculture and food security by boosting the frequency of reference to cross-sector impacts on both nutrition and health. Impact measurement becomes difficult here, because the Conference was not the only initiative highlighting cross-sector linkages underway. Nonetheless, the average number of Google Internet hits per search for the phrase linking agriculture, nutrition, and health increased from 9,288 in the pre-Conference period to 13,508 in the immediate post-Conference period of MarchMay 2011. Searches of organization websites revealed that 18 of 21 of the sites had more links to agriculture, nutrition, and health issues immediately following the Conference compared to just before, and 20 of 21 had an even higher number of such links one year later in July 2012. The most obvious limitation on impact has been at the level of national government policy (excluding donor policies). Partly this reflects attendance. Only 19 percent of those who attended the 2020 Conference were government officials, compared to 41 percent who came from research institutes or universities. Yet, even where Conference impacts on governments might have seemed probable, they have proved (so far) to be mostly tentative or modest. The government of Malawi co-hosted its own version of the 2020 Conference in Lilongwe in September 2011. While this was an important step, the Conference was donor-suggested and donor-funded, and senior officials from the Ministry of Health were unable to attend.In Uganda, the 2020 Conference helped sustain an effort to mainstream nutrition within the Ministry of Agriculture. However, this effort was underway before the Conference, and parallel efforts from USAID, WFP, and FAO did as much to sustain it.In China, the leadership of the State Food and Nutrition Consultation Committee was briefed on 2020 Conference materials, which may have helped to establish a new (but already approved) food safety and nutrition development institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). Since Chinese leaders had been unable to attend the Conference itself, impacts in the country also depended heavily on a separate outreach effort by IFPRI leadership.In India, national officials and researchersand IFPRImade concerted efforts to use the Conference to shape language in the new 12th Five-Year Plan (201216). While some engaged in this effort claimed progress in that direction, nothing definitive has emerged and in India it appears that little has changed in the traditional separation between the agriculture ministry and the nutrition and health sectors. The Conferences largest impacts within India were felt at the individual level, at the level of discourse, or within some state administrations, not within national governmental institutions. What can one reasonably expect when looking for impacts from a single international Conference? In the case of the 2020 Conference in Delhi, where the goal was to change the way individuals and institutions were thinking about ANH issues and considering them in professional discourse, measurable progress was made toward each of these goals in both the short term and the medium term. IFPRI took a risk by designing the Delhi Conference to challenge traditional paradigms. This assessment shows that, in both the short term and medium term, the risk has been rewarded.
This study uses country-level panel data on 57 countries in Africa and Asia from 1981 to 2014 to assess the relationships between IFPRI’s in-country presence (as measured by staff present) and various policy and outcome indicators in those countries. An econometric model with country fixed-effects, year fixed-effects, and country-specific time trends is used, controlling for several factors deemed to affect the different policy and outcome indicators such as the country’s research capacity, production environment and resources, political economy and institutions, and complementary investments.
