Back in 2012, when I started as CEO of the CGIAR Consortium, I made the development of a “performance management system” for the CGIAR Consortium a top priority. Now, a year later, I can report that we have taken some big strides in that direction. Starting today, we are presenting and discussing the Theories of Change, Impact Pathways and Intermediate Development Outcomes for the CGIAR Research Programs, (CRPs), with our donors and our partners. What we are talking about here are clear, development outcomes that have been reached by consensus. The Programs, together with their partners, can be held accountable for delivering these outcomes. Program level outcomes tied to outcomes at CGIAR System Level – Improved Food Security, Reduced Rural Poverty, Improved Health and Nutrition, and Sustainably Managed Natural Resources – are in turn linked to the new Sustainable Development Goals. Together with solid monitoring and reporting, these outcomes constitute the foundation, the building blocks, for the CGIAR’s results based performance management system.
The new portfolio
Over the past few years, the 15 Research Centers, which are members of the CGIAR Consortium, have joined with partners to develop a portfolio of 16 CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs) to guide and focus their agricultural research for development. That portfolio is now up and running and Center-based projects and programs have been integrated into this new research structure. In 2012, the Research Centers of the CGIAR Consortium reported that 80% of all research carried out had been done so within the CRPs. This marks a major institutional transition over a relatively short period of time.
To get the portfolio up and running as quickly as possible, these 16 Programs were developed with a “bottom up” approach, one by one. Their progress developed in a staggered fashion, in parallel with a Strategy and Results Framework for the CGIAR. As a result, each CRP developed its own terminology, defined its own sets of milestones, outputs and outcomes, and selected research sites in a manner that was largely independent of other CGIAR Programs.
The SRF Action Plan lays out our plan to increase coherence and consistency across the portfolio, and we are now in the midst of implementing this strategy. At the heart of this plan is the idea that the CRPs will develop a small number of Intermediate Development Outcomes – think five to seven – and that they should do this together. In order to increase internal consistency, a set of guidelines has been drawn up.
Rapid progress
The CRPs are improving their sets of outcomes and associated impact pathways and theories of change in an iterative manner. The latest set of proposals shows remarkable progress. The CRP leaders have jointly defined a set of about ten common development outcomes that many Programs can share, with some specific outcomes added for individual CRPs. While targets – which should be quantitative and geographically explicit where possible – will be specific for each Program, the common definitions are expected to enable aggregation up to portfolio level by subject, by scale (beneficiaries reached) and by geography. This really does represent significant progress over a short period of time.
Feedback: listen and learn
In the next two weeks, here in Montpellier, the CRPs will present the latest developments in their thinking to donors and partners – and to each other. We expect that the feedback received through this dialog will support the Programs in their development of the next phase, which involves producing short documents that jointly lay out a core part of the accountability framework for the CGIAR portfolio. After that stage has been completed, this output will be gathered together to produce both a CRP Portfolio Outcomes report and a 2013 Management Update of the CGIAR SRF, scheduled to be available in draft by September 2013. As a result of all the work undertaken this year, we expect that a number of CRPs will participate in a Results Based Management Pilot in 2014, and that all the others will both make use of the new targets to improve their current programs and also build on them as a key foundation for developing their proposals for the next stage.
The interest in what we are doing is palpable. More than 160 people have gathered here in Montpellier, including stakeholders, donors and CRP staff. As they listen, learn and engage with each other, they are helping to develop a new improved portfolio of CGIAR Research Programs. In so doing, they are showing a strong and renewed commitment to efforts aimed at achieving a food secure future.
More information:
CGIAR Research Program Engagement with Donors and External Stakeholders – for resources related to the Montpellier event. #LELP2013 #Ag4Dev (Listening Engaging Learning Progressing – LELP2013)