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Wed, 14 May 2014 11:00:13 +0200 |
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I am Dr. Atse M. Yapi, an Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Consultant at the FAO Regional office for Africa, Accra, Ghana. I have been involved in impact assessment of agricultural research technologies from joint research efforts by national agricultural research systems (NARS) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Mali, Northern Cameroon and Chad for a number of years. Based on my experience, I would like to make some comments on issues raised in previous messages.
Huu-Nhuan Nguyen in Message 5 wrote: ".the results and findings of current impact assessment approaches have been sometimes misleading, attributing larger impact to a single project and ignoring overlapped impacts from the synergistic effects as a result of simultaneous initiatives in the same area."
I think this is a relevant observation, which however is more a problem of transparency than approaches. One possible way of addressing it is to acknowledge in the assessment process all contributing projects and indicate clearly how such contributions are treated in the impact assessment. For example, in assessing the economic impact of sorghum variety S35 in Chad, we have realized that a FAO-supported seed station in the country has been instrumental in the wide adoption of the technology by farmers in areas targeted by the research efforts. The government roads system has also facilitated the extension efforts and thus contributed tremendously in the wide adoption of the technology by farmers. Nevertheless, the methodology we used to assess the economic impact of the technology did not take into account the costs of the establishment of the seed station nor did it take into account the costs of constructing the roads. These costs have been treated as sunk costs and rightly so for obvious reasons. This sort of situations should not in any way be looked at as major constraints to the validity of the assessment made.
Dr. Atse M. Yapi
Agriculture and Natural Resource Policy Consultant
FAO Regional Office for Africa
Box 1628 Accra,
Ghana
Email: Atse.Yapi (at) fao.org ; atseyapi25 (at) yahoo.com
[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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