Donors and partners tell CGIAR program leaders to “Show us the impact”

Post written by Frank Rijsberman and Patrick Dugan, meeting co-chairs

Over the last two weeks we chaired four two-day meetings during which 170 participants from CGIAR donors, partners and research teams discussed the development outcomes that the 16 CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) aim to achieve. Each team presented their intermediate development outcomes (IDOs), together with the impact pathways and theories of change to show how these outcomes would come about. Some teams have developed detailed, geographically explicit targets along with metrics to assess progress towards those targets. Some presented information on what it would cost to deliver these outcomes, whilst others presented evidence that the outcomes they pursue would lead to development impact. You can find all the team presentations and supporting documents here, together with interviews with some of the meeting participants.

Donors and partners asked questions and provided feedback indicating; what they appreciated about the presentations, what was missing, what they agreed with – and also what they disagreed with. Some teams were told that donors and partners were impressed with progress towards a research program design with the potential for significant development impact –they agreed it was an exciting and credible plan towards delivering significant development outcomes for millions of people within the next ten years.  Other teams left with a list of questions and comments that need to be addressed before their plans are similarly credible.

Recurring themes of the feedback were that:

• the CGIAR donors are development agencies that invest in the CGIAR Research Programs not because of their interest in research outputs per se. Research for which there is no evidence that it leads to development outcomes is therefore not of interest to CGIAR investors;

• the complex hunger, poverty, malnutrition and sustainability challenges CGIAR is addressing require many research partners – both upstream, advanced research partners, as well as national and local partners who can work more directly with users to help foster local innovation, and to develop and test technologies and approaches that can be taken to scale. Given the importance of these partnerships the feedback strongly encouraged CGIAR to demonstrate; the precise roles of partners, their specific contributions to CGIAR Research Programs; and their resourcing, showing where partners lead the charge and how this partner capacity is enabled effectively;

• CGIAR Research Programs need to demonstrate that their innovations can reach millions of users within ten years or sooner, depending on their current stage of maturity.  We were reminded that we will only achieve this by working through effective partnerships with development institutions (including governments, international agencies, and NGOs),  and that CGIAR will therefore be held accountable for ensuring that we align our research with the priorities of these development partners and build the strong partnerships required;

• CGIAR Research Programs need to demonstrate that linkages among them are effective and duplication and inefficiency avoided; and

• much more progress is needed to develop credible outcome targets, indicators to track progress towards them, monitoring systems to measure progress verifiably, and evidence that these outcomes do indeed lead to impact.

One of us, Patrick Dugan, was charged with feeding back key messages from across the meetings to the group of CRP leaders and his synthesis report can be found here. In addition, the meeting rapporteurs are preparing meeting summaries for each session that will be uploaded to the CGIAR website as well.

Both donors and partners noted that over the last year there has been significant progress towards development of a more coherent, integrated portfolio of focused research programs for CGIAR – after the programs were admittedly developed in “stand-alone” fashion”. While there is still much more work to do before the whole portfolio has clear development outcomes that are all demonstrably high value for money, there were examples of excellence in individual programs that are worth sharing and rolling out across the portfolio. To name a few:

• The Agriculture for Nutrition and Health program stood out for its evidence of impact and potential to scale up to reach millions for its biofortification work – leveraging the HarvestPlus challenge program.
• The Forest, Trees and Agroforestry program developed a system for mapping and tracking all of its projects, including those funded bilaterally, to its development outcomes.
• The Roots, Tubers and Bananas program developed a new structure of focused “discovery and delivery” flagships that increases their ability to deliver their development outcomes, replacing its thematic structure with hundreds of products and product lines.
• The Humid Tropics program managed to develop a completely new set of development outcomes, impact pathways, theories of change – as well as a first generation of targets and indicators – over the last three months, responding effectively to the challenge to catch up with the portfolio.

The donors indicated that their willingness to fund the CGIAR Research Programs through different modalities is closely linked to the trust and confidence they have in the portfolio:

• Core funding of the portfolio through Window 1 of the CGIAR Fund requires that a donor has trust and confidence in the whole portfolio – and as long as some programs do not meet the bar, at least a number of donors will not fund through this modality.
• Core funding of a specific program through Window 2 requires that a donor has sufficient confidence in the whole CRP.
• If donors do not think all CRPs in the portfolio are worthy of support, or do not think all parts of a CRP meet their priorities and standards, they can still fund a specific area through a bilateral project with a contract of their design and under their control. Of course, some donors, or some funds within donor agencies, can only support bilateral projects (or funding through Window 3).

In other words, it is up to the CGIAR Consortium and its members to deliver a portfolio of sufficiently high quality across the board to enable and encourage donors to invest through Windows 1 and 2. Such trust and confidence must be earned, by demonstrating achievement of development outcomes and evidence of impact. We conclude that we still have our work cut out for us – but that we have made a significant step in the right direction through the current effort to define clear development outcomes and associated targets. We thank all donors and partners for their active participation in the process and for their valuable feedback.