Taking a Country-Level Approach to Documenting Diffusion of Agricultural Innovations in Ethiopia
Shining a Brighter Light: Comprehensive Evidence on Adoption and Diffusion of CGIAR-Related Innovations in Ethiopia is a new report that focuses on the success of agricultural innovations in the last 20 years in Ethiopia, in particular those linked to CGIAR. It is the culmination of work to develop and pilot, a comprehensive, country-level framework, led by the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA), working closely with partners at the Ethiopian Central Statistics Agency (CSA), and the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study team (LSMS).
“We selected Ethiopia to pilot our country-level approach as it is a hotspot of CGIAR research—almost all CGIAR centers are represented there,” explains Karen Macours, SPIA Chair, and Professor at the Paris School of Economics and Researcher at the French National Research Institute for Agricultural, Food, and Environment. “We included innovations in a nationally representative household survey—the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey—which has a strong focus on agriculture. This allowed us to document the extent to which innovations have been scaled up over time”.
Better Data Through Sustained Partnerships
The researchers started by systematically documenting innovations to which CGIAR research had contributed, through desk reviews, and interviews with CGIAR scientists and staff from the national agricultural research system and government agencies. This resulted in a stocktaking exercise covering 52 CGIAR-related innovations—documented over the 1999–2019 period—and 26 claims of policy influence.
Read the full news story on the CGIAR Advisory Services/SPIA Website