Monitoring and Evaluation to Strengthen the Performance of Agricultural R&d

Over the past decade, donors have made a concerted effort to improve aid effectiveness. This intent was codified by the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in the Paris Declaration of 2005, under which development agencies agreed to manage their aid budgets on the basis of five principles, two of which included managing development funds for results and mutual accountability (Chapter 6, this volume). The focus on results-based management and accountability further emphasized evaluation methods and monitoring systems in contractual arrangements associated with the investment of international public funds in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA), including investment in such public goods as agricultural research. The focus on performance monitoring in agricultural projects was reinforced by the entry of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation into agricultural development in SSA and by the integration of the private sector’s “bottom line” into project development and results frameworks. The emphasis on accountability within the timeframe of project investment shifted the focus in performance monitoring from ex post impact assessment to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) methods, and thus from economic methods to methodologies coming from the expanding disciplinary field of evaluation. This disciplinary differentiation created boundaries between M&E frameworks incorporated in donor projects, where the focus was direct benefits and project targets and impact assessment associated with measuring both firstand second-order economic benefits, such as real income gains to consumers and producers, environmental protection, and institutional learning (Chapter 11, this volume). Because most donors, except the World Bank, were not funding national agricultural research capacity and development projects, the focus on developing M&E methods for the relatively new area of agricultural research