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Moderated conference on impact assessment of agricultural research: May 2014

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Mon, 26 May 2014 18:01:55 +0200
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My name is Fred Zaal, I'm a senior advisor at the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) in Amsterdam. Please look at www.kit.nl/sed for more information on my affiliation.

The issue discussed must occur on many occasions and in many ways. The non-economic impact is hard to assess in comparison with the quantitative methods developed for the economic impact of agricultural research for development (AR4D). Indeed, in our work we've come across this often, and have used the livelihoods approach to try to collect qualitative data in a systematic way. The issues mentioned (baseline, adoption, indicators and attribution) by Mario Pareja (Message 66), I recognise very clearly as limitations.

We (and this means: a large team of people from various Dutch, Ghanaian and Burkinabé universities, KIT, and a number of NGOs in the Netherlands), have tried to develop a systematic way to address these limitations, mostly because we were interested in something else entirely: to use the word evaluation to describe the value that beneficiaries experience from interventions. Asking them in a very systematic way solves some of the limitations discussed, or at least it makes clear that there are indeed complicating starting points for innovation processes, complicated routes along which innovations reach the farmer, a complicated set of indicators that should and can be taken along, and a partial solution to the problem of attribution in general.

We have called this method Participatory Assessment of Development (www.PADev.nl), and found that it helped greatly in getting the information needed to assess the context of an AR4D process and in fact any other intervention. Using the livelihood framework and asking separate groups in local communities, a systematic way was developed of identifying relevant changes, alternative interventions that may have played a role, and assessments by the people that should know best, the farmers, of the impact.

The project ended last year. Since then this method has been used in many projects, as it can be adapted to local needs and circumstances quite easily. The experiences are also written up and published on the website. I think it could help in developing a (mixed) method that would give more insight in the non-economic impact, and especially the impact as it has been experienced by farmers (men and women, young and old, migrants and long-term residents, different ethnic/religious groups, etc, depending on the groups asked).

Fred Zaal 
Senior Advisor 
KIT Sustainable Economic Development
P.O. Box 95001 
1090 HA 
Amsterdam 
The Netherlands
T +31 (0)20 568 8557 
http://www.kit.nl/sed 
e-mail: F.Zaal (at) kit.nl

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [log in to unmask] For further information, see http://www.fao.org/nr/research-extension-systems/res-home/news/detail/en/c/217706/ ].

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