Ghana joins 10 others to
improve agricultural development
prospects
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, Ghanadot
Accra, July 28, Ghanadot -
Delegations from eight developing African countries arrived
in Addis Ababa this spring with a common goal –they wanted
better results for their investments in agriculture.
They left with a plan to measure the effectiveness of
programs with the help of a new initiative that aims to find
out what works on the ground, and what doesn’t.
Agricultural Adaptations, or “AADAPT,” supports rigorous
assessments of agricultural development projects known as
“impact evaluations.” The program’s major goals are to
gather knowledge about agricultural best practices and to
provide the evidence needed for more effective agricultural
policies and programs.
The initiative has the potential to “radically shift the
path of agricultural development,” and improve the lives of
millions of small farmers and others in rural areas who
depend on agriculture for their incomes and very survival,
says Arianna Legovini, head of Development Impact Evaluation
at the World Bank.
“Doing this as part of our agricultural program is
critically important today,” says Legovini. “Countries were
very vulnerable to the food crisis and vulnerability might
increase with changes in climate. There is a new urgency to
invest in knowledge for agricultural growth and food
security.”
The recent G8 meeting in Italy reiterated the importance of
food security and expressed concern about the impact of
financial crisis and high food prices in developing
countries, as well as the longstanding underinvestment in
agriculture.
11 Countries Join AADAPT
The AADAPT initiative—a collaboration of developing
countries, the World Bank, and several partners—is part of
the World Bank’s renewed effort to place agriculture at the
center of the development agenda, as recommended by World
Development Report 2008.
Many countries suffered food shortages as well as high
prices at the height of the food crisis last year, and many
remain vulnerable. About 75 percent of the world’s poor
depend on rain-fed agriculture for their livelihoods.
Between 2000 and 2025, the number of Africans living in
water-scarce environments is expected to increase from 300
million to 600 million.
Facing some of these challenges, Ethiopia, Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger,
Nigeria, and Tanzania attended AADAPT’s inaugural workshop
in Addis Ababa in April. Brazil, India, and Peru have also
joined the new initiative so far.
“We’ve been spending a lot of money on our programs and we
are not sure whether our interventions have been effective
and whether what we are doing is right or not,” explains
Tigist Redda, a workshop participant from Ethiopia.
Program Promotes Evidence-Based Policies
Under AADAPT, teams of experts will work hand-in-hand with
government ministries and World Bank project teams to
measure impact using data collection, surveys and control
groups as necessary to obtain actual results, says Stephen
Mink, World Bank lead economist working on Africa
agriculture.
While World Bank projects commonly include monitoring and
evaluation, AADAPT, with initial funding of about $1.2
million, provides extra resources, both financial and
technical, to obtain a “deeper causality of what’s working
and what’s not,” says Mink.
The program’s country-driven and high-quality impact
evaluations compare the outcomes associated with a program
against the outcomes that would have occurred had the
program not been in place, says Legovini.
AADAPT to Bridge Knowledge Gaps
AADAPT particularly tries to bridge knowledge gaps on how
to:increase the adoption of agricultural technology , secure
high returns on investment in irrigation and other rural
infrastructure, reduce the vulnerability of rural
populations and manage natural resources sustainable.
Workshop facilitators helped each country delegation design
a work plan to test agricultural policies and evaluate their
impact.
The AADAPT workshop also created a community of practice,
for countries to share evidence and experiences and to have
ongoing discussions about what works.
“It’s not just to find out whether the programs work,” says
Legovini, “but knowing what works within the programs, that
will make the programs more effective in the long run.”
AADAPT Seeks the Right Incentives
For example, a small fertilizer subsidy was seen in one case
as being more effective if provided shortly after a harvest,
when farmers have more money to purchase fertilizer, than a
bigger subsidy provided later on, when farmers have less
money.
Patrick Verissimo, a senior agriculture economist in
Mozambique for the World Bank, says AADAPT will help
evaluate whether establishing savings groups and promoting
the adoption of new technologies will boost the incomes of
small-scale farmers and female-headed households.
AADAPT is also helping to define what will be measured
during an upcoming irrigation project, such as the extent to
which improved water management leads to increased
productivity on farms, he says.
“AADAPT is helping us build impact evaluation into the
design of our project so that we don’t just measure results
at the end but learn as we go,” says Verissimo.
Goal is to Provide ‘Best Advice We Can’
For large rural infrastructure, countries need to find ways
to secure high returns on investment by rapidly transforming
agricultural production systems and ensuring the financial
sustainability of operations and maintenance.
Knowing how to make it all work is a “fundamental ingredient
in ensuring public sectors have an interest and incentive to
invest in costly infrastructure to lower vulnerability and
increase growth in their countries,” says Legovini.
“The idea is to provide the best advice we can, in terms of
content and quality of data that gets collected in each
country, and also to have a way of comparing results across
countries, by measuring them in the same way.”
Similar programs are currently being implemented in
education, malaria, HIV, and local government by the World
Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation Initiative and its
partners.
The World Bank’s partners in AADAPT are the International
Food Policy Research Institute and several universities
including Oxford, California at Berkeley, Maryland, Padova,
and Yale, with support from the World Bank’s Gender Action
Plan and the Trust Fund for environmentally and Socially
Sustainable Development. The Gates Foundation supports the
program through the Living Standards Measurement Survey for
agriculture.
Ghanadot
