This report highlights achievements made in 2013 by IFPRI and its partners in support of the CAADP implementation agenda through ReSAKSS, the AGRODEP Modeling Consortium, and analytical work on agricultural growth and investment options.

Introduction: Since 2006, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has provided policy research and capacity-strengthening support to guide the planning and implementation of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). Endorsed in 2003 by African heads of state and government, CAADP is a continentwide framework for accelerating growth and progress toward poverty reduction and food and nutrition security through an agriculture-led growth strategy. As part of IFPRI’s support to CAADP, the Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) was established in 2006 to provide policy-relevant analysis, data, and tools necessary to support the formulation and implementation of evidence-based agricultural-sector policies and strategies, as well as to facilitate CAADP policy dialogue, peer review, benchmarking, and mutual learning processes. ReSAKSS is facilitated by IFPRI in partnership with Africa-based CGIAR centers, the African Union Commission (AUC), the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency (NPCA), and leading regional economic communities (RECs)

This paper presents results of a data partnership framework for strengthening evidence-based planning and implementation that was initiated in 2019 in five selected African countries (Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, and Togo) during the second round of the CAADP biennial review (BR) process. It analyzes the effect of the activities conducted on the data reporting rate and the quality of data reported in the five pilot countries, compared with what was achieved in like-pilot countries. The like-pilot countries are non-pilot countries that have characteristics like the pilot countries at the baseline which affect selection into the pilot or the data reporting and quality outcomes. Different methods (standard deviations, propensity score matching, and two-stage weighted regression) are used to identify the like-pilot countries, and a difference-in-difference method is used to estimate the effect of the pilot activities on the outcomes. The capacity-strengthening activities focused on working with the country Biennial Review (BR) team to: assess the inaugural or 2018 BR process and identify the data gaps; constitute and train members of data clusters to compile and check the data for the 2020 BR; and then validate and submit the data. The findings show that the activities helped the pilot countries to improve their performance in the data reporting rate and the quality of data reported in the 2020 BR. The largest improvement is observed in Togo and Senegal, followed by Kenya and Malawi, and then Mozambique. The average increase in the data reporting rate between 2018 and 2020 BRs for the pilot countries is greater than the average progress made in the like-pilot countries by about 6 to 9 % pts. This derives mostly from improvements in the data reporting rate for the indicators under theme 3 on ending hunger. Regarding the quality of data reported (measured as the percent of the data reported that have issues) too, the pilot countries on average performed better than the like-pilot countries, especially with respect to the data reported under themes 2 on investment in agriculture and 3 on ending hunger. But most of the estimated differences have low or no statistical significance. Implications for sustaining the progress made in the pilot countries, as well as for extending the activities to other countries, for the next rounds of the BR are discussed.

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.

IFPRI commissioned this study to assess how the country programs (CPs) are performing—which approaches and methods are producing the best outcomes across countries and over time—to identify factors that promote or impede their progress and lessons for making them more impactful in the future. The study has two major components. The first is a survey and analysis of the factors that CP leaders perceived to have most helped them influence host-country policies. We interviewed all current and most past CP leaders, which enabled us to compile evidence from recent CP experiences as well as from the 1980s and 1990s. We focused on the lessons they drew from their past successes that shed light on how to make their other activities successful. We did not undertake similar interviews on failed efforts because it is much harder to elicit such information from CP leaders. Additional insights about unsuccessful activities are, however, captured in the second component of the study, a commissioned external evaluation of the performance of a sample of ongoing country programs. Ideally, the external evaluation would have included CPs in both Africa and Asia, but this was not possible with the available budget. We therefore settled for an evaluation of CPs in Africa south of the Sahara. Doing so had two advantages: (1) the African CPs are more homogenous in terms of their objectives, structure, and internal IFPRI management, making comparisons among them more insightful; and (2) the budget was sufficient to both include all the African CPs in some of the analyses and allow the external evaluator to visit three of them.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. The book examines the methodological challenges in analyzing the effectiveness of development policies. It presents a selection of tools and methodologies that can help tackle the complexities of which policies work best and why, and how they can be implemented effectively given the political and economic framework conditions of a country. The contributions in this book offer a continuation of the ongoing evidence-based debate on the role of agriculture and participatory policy processes in reducing poverty. They develop and apply quantitative political economy approaches by integrating quantitative models of political decision-making into existing economic modeling tools, allowing a more comprehensive growth-poverty analysis. The book addresses not only scholars who use quantitative policy modeling and evaluation techniques in their empirical or theoretical research, but also technical experts, including policy makers and analysts from stakeholder organizations, involved in formulating and implementing policies to reduce poverty and to increase economic and social well-being in African countries.