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- jenspeter on S2 – Q4 – Scenario 2, Question 4 (Livestock and Fish with a Global Animal Science Agenda – Theory of Change)
- Mblummel on S1 – Q1 – Scenario 1, Question 1 (Livestock and Fish like now – Key Research Areas)
- Mblummel on S1 – Q1 – Scenario 1, Question 1 (Livestock and Fish like now – Key Research Areas)
- Mblummel on S1 – Q1 – Scenario 1, Question 1 (Livestock and Fish like now – Key Research Areas)
L&F Yammer Group
--Interaction across the value chains is weak in my eyes.
--Although we are still on ‘testing phase’, I don’t think we have had significant impact on the ground- at least with the communities we 'experiment' on
I agree that interaction between the flag ships could be much stronger or at least more visible. It also seems that different flagships pick up a different ball and run with it. But this may be because the full picture cannot be presented in short presentations.
In all flagships, the involvement of value chain actors - especially the poor ones - is questioned. Who chooses innovations? How can livestock and fish keepers be involved in assessing importance of health issues? What kind of feed technologies are in demand. We seem to lack the capability to smartly engage with value chain actors - from farmers to consumers. We consult, but they do not participate.
Cross flagship interaction is poor. We operate in silos between flagships, and between VC and flagship levels. This means that we do not see things in relationship to one another or in relation to context. We retain our islands of interest without seeing important dynamics across disciplines and across space. Here, system actors innovate yet we are not even researching this. It is almost as if we are examining individual bricks without sight of the building that they form. Our research is not exploring interaction, for we do not see interaction as being any more than the sum of parts. Our linear approach leads to discombobulation and may explain why our various bits are not joined up.
yes, but cross-flagship interaction has and is improving slowly. I see from the summary documents posted today that a couple of flagship leaders are acknowledging intra-CRP linkages that they intend to operationalize.
On the VC-tech flagship linkages, we have not done so well and this is in part due to how budgets are allocated/controlled - the VCs have very little funding and while some have interacted with the tech flagships to convey what they need research done upon, they have failed to persuade them to direct their larger funds their way. I would be interested to hear opinions from the tech flagships on this point
These processes seem to be going faster where bilaterals have provided the resources to achieve more - so I think there is a resourcing issue here not just the VCs but also possibly for tech groups to engineer change. Another issue is the time it takes to implement change where previous investment has focused the activity, not necessarily wrongly.
Stuart - I actually disagree that we operate in silos, particularly between flagship and VC levels. For example, I consider myself to be part of both a technical flagship as well as a VC team member for the VCs where I am engaging. I think the actual issue is that these collaborations are rarely highlighted / articulated - we need to pay more attention to this.
Karen - I agree with you that there is more interaction between technical flagships and the VCs. Highlighting this has not been done dutifully may be because we are following the reporting formats of the CO which do not explicitly provide a section on this. I think that we should, going forward, develop a supplementary (explicit) reporting template for this and other areas of internal interest to us.
Adding my support to these comments (having not highlighted them enough in my technical talk!
Also wish to support this, although the interaction between the discovery flagships and the value chains undoubtedly still leaves room for improvement. My concern is more the lack of interaction / information exchange /learning between the different value chains. Especially when it comes to themes outside the comfort zones of most of us .. involvement private sector, business models etc. Without wanting to increase transaction costs we really need to take more advantage of our geographical spread.
In some of the activities we have manage to link to global scale to the local scale (see my comment to the previous question), however we (SASI?) haven't been very strong at learning from the local and bring it back into a more general concept. Maybe it is a timing question, first things need to happen locally before we can aggregate them to the global scale (and understand out-scaling). Maybe it is time to look at least at the mechanism that will allow us the get the information? I guess this brings us back to : how do we interact across the flagships? and how do we monitor and learn from the VC?
We are not good at defining sharp, relevant and easily testable sets of research questions to guide our work. May well have to do with the fact, mentioned by others, that we are not yet comfortable and capable(?) of engaging with other stakeholders in the value chains from the very outset.
I agree with you Jens. May be that is because our researches are driven by the donors interest and the impact they like to see on beneficiaries.
I think we have not begun to think about how we measure value change transformation. I am sure there is an econometric type approach but the sum will be greater than the whole in terms of change. How can we measure that? Stuart once shared with me a paper (from the ECB) that looked at social change in quite a different perspective...we most likely need to adopt several different perspectives on this issue.
1) I still don’t see much progress in terms of validating the potential of our innovations. Without this sort of evidence we lack credibility with potential donors and development partners.
2) We are not as successful at attracting funding as we should be, leading to … (fill in your favourite undesirable consequence). There are several reasons for this:
a. We are still unable to articulate a truly compelling narrative around why our product lines are going to transform the lives of the poor. Its sometimes hard even for me to figure out how cage farming catfish, sweet potato pig diets, community based breeding, etc. will change the world.
b. Related to the above, we need to develop compelling ToCs for the technology flagships so that they can better articulate a compelling vision for the future and a plan of necessary changes to realize it (in partnership with the VCs).
c. We lack evidence to convince donors that we have workable and proven solutions (see 1 above)
d. Too much of the burden for resource mobilization falls onto the VCs.
From Addis/Ethiopia/small ruminant/feed/gender team: maybe we need to focus on distilling convincing successes and showing them to the world (i.e. the donors). e.g. use of most-significant change stories. Having said this, some things are long term and require longer time frames to show success. As noted above we need to get better at evaluating what we have done.
Proper documenting of best-bets (why selected, who was involved in the decision etc.). Could someone (Keith?) comment on the current state of the template for this?
Addis team: agree with this. At least some of us. We don't know about the "template".
There is a best-bet guidance note - see: http://livestock-fish.wikispaces.com/Country+%27best+bets%27 - Keith can expand, but I believe this will be tested in several VCs this year.
The Best Bet Guidelines were published to the Wiki. I was supposed to travel to Uganda last week to test them, but my plans were scuttled due to the budget crisis when all non-essential travel was canceled. I will be resuming discussion with the Ugandan team in mid-April to see how they can be tested with remote support.
PS
Please take a look and consider how your team will implement them. The results from our testing should be ready by the end of April.
Utilizing learning lessons from experiences of others on VCTS for developing country livestock production systems – do we have a good overview of what these learning lessons are?
In line with the report from Day 1 asking where this review of different value chains should sit within the CRP, I think it fits well in the monitoring evaluation component of SASI.
Humidtropics originally had this in mind and called it global synthesis. Keith Child can probably tell us more how that was supposed to work (until IITA Headquarters unfortunately decided to unravel the original global synthesis activity).
Karen, I agree -- I think this is where we might have needed more 'carrot and stick' actions to make sure we first scanned the horizon to find out what others have done, what worked/didn't work. We tried to institute this as 'successes/failures reviews' in each subject area, but did not follow through to make sure it happened. For me, this reflects how short-sighted we have become, so that the pressure of getting activities done means we have dropped the scholarly part of our research, esp. on the social science side.
We need more stringent M and E system, because there are many non tangible success we escape to document. As we (non social scientists) are in the field, we really see some trends/changes but don't know at which extend they are important. Now I am asked all these questions how what is changing? and I am stacked not because I have anything to report, but do not know how to package my outputs to translate them into changes.
Related to us not documenting the changes, I think we actually lack a clear strategy/research agenda around understanding the processes of change and how we can/cannot influence them
On monitoring and evaluation, the Day 1 report asks whether to tax the different flagship for M&E. Rather than calling it a tax, I would suggest rather: an investment. When I used to work in the evaluation unit of the French Ministry of Agriculture, we used to follow European Commission guidelines and encourage our colleagues from the operational directorates to set aside 10% of the total budget they had for a given program.
This investment allowed for the evaluation unit to help those who had conceived and were implementing the program to set up a robust monitoring and evaluation process that could measure impact, and just as important, identify the successes and things to be improved in order to reach greater impact.
I guess the same is valid for an R4D program.
Thanks Jo! Investment certainly has a much better connotation than tax. When I came to ILRI it was from an NGO, where anywhere from 6 to 20 percent was dedicated to monitoring and evaluation. Obviously the context is very different, but the expense was regarded as an essential pre-requisite to attracting future donor support (not to mention mid-course corrections). I am still perplexed that the CRP has no target spending for MEL. To my mind a MEL budget should be build into all our product lines, and MEL itself should be conceived as both a research activity and management service.
From Addis Think Tank: we may not be very good at interacting regularly with key decision makers. This seems to be going reasonably well in Tz through DDF but should we be thinking about similar fora in other value chains. We need a light/sweet format for this kind of interaction - targeted sessions would be good. Sometimes go to see them rather than them being expected to come to us. This kind of thing seems to fall through the cracks.
Managing data sets for Organizational Development – I wrote about it in this blog: http://livestockfish.cgiar.org/2014/11/27/diana-data/
In summary it is about which data we need to convince resource organisations, investors, incubator funds and the likes to expand financial investment for organizational development of our partners? Still, development resources are mainly invested through channels that are reserved for specific organization types. NGOs and UN organizations are resourced through contracts, grants and mandate agreements. Government agencies are resourced through their parliaments. Profit making development contractors are resourced through competitive bidding. Private sector companies are resourced through profit making business activities. Research organizations are resourced through national and international scientific investment instruments. The confluence between CGIAR research and development may bring you two potential resourcing possibilities:
Firstly, by aligning existing work towards mutually desired goals, development partners can exploit the benefits of directing research funding – to value chain specific issues – to local organizations for specific and targeted capacity strengthening purposes and; 2) Research actors can likewise exploit the benefits of allocating development funding to partners based on assessed needs/demands (read more about how we are supporting (gender) capacity assessment work here: piecing together the (gender) research for (capacity) development puzzle).
By promoting system wide engagement across value chains, our program facilitates structured engagement across many actors and projects to form multi-stranded movement that make collective sense, and we will inform “investors and governments” soon about our capacity assessment findings (and oh yes, for sure we see this as “Big Data”) so to help push and pull for whole system change across the three regions we work in.
Secondly, in a more data rich world one could mount a strong argument for the UN index also to include so much more that is important to people: measures of voice, job security, social protection, equality, sustainability, rights and dignity would all help paint a much richer picture. Although data is somewhat available in countries where we work (e.g. we do know what the Uganda small holder pig value chain sector can contribute to reduce poverty and we initiated work to strengthen individual and organizational capacities, we have assessed market opportunities in the aquaculture sector in Bangladesh and women enterprise investment prospects in Egypt, and in the dairy in Tanzania, our contribution to the “Big Data Revolution” has, seemingly, not yet reached policy makers and/or investors to enable – large scale - local rural transformations.
Articulate the purposes of the capacity development component of specific value chain program/projects and the Theory of Change.
Brainstorming about potential measurements by identifying the specific capacity, behavior, and performance changes we expect to see (as well as areas where we are unsure what to expect, but want to monitor change if it occurs) needs to continue to take place.
I have written about this in this blog: http://livestockfish.cgiar.org/2015/02/12/diana-game4toc/
Our goal is to be a research for development partner that contributes to transformational results, and that demonstrates relevance, focus, and value. To do this, we have to introduce changes in the way we manage for better results and higher levels of performance through improved measurement on capacity development. Late last year (2014) we proposed to CGIAR and ILRI’ s Assistant Director General/Board possible capacity development indicators based on the questions what capacities, whose capacities and how capacities are being developed and for what expected output or outcome.
Happy to share the matrix developed.
At the CGIAR level the below IDO’s were suggested:
1) Proposed IDO on “Enhanced Capacities”:
The ability of CRPs to achieve impact at scale -- measured in terms of ‘material’ IDOs -- relies upon individual and team capacities and the broader capacities of the systems in which they work. Enhanced capacities are therefore an integral part of the process for achievement of the SLOs and impact at scale. Notwithstanding the cross-cutting nature of this IDO, its achievement would require making capacity explicit, including by tracking it against quantitative and qualitative indicators. This IDO details three dimensions of capacity to allow CRPs to build the necessary enabling conditions for sustained impact on other IDOs.
Proposed sub-IDO 1: Enhanced capacity to lead research in development in the future
A critical mass of new research in development leaders is essential to the sustained delivery of development outcomes in a large diversity of settings. Youth need to be engaged and inspired into considering a career in agriculture, and talents from different genders and ethnicities need to be attracted and nurtured into pursuing areas of MSc, PhD and postdoctoral research that are central to the SRF. In addition, higher level staff need to be encouraged to exchange experiences and work across organizations and settings. This capacity should involve training and mentoring in disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches, in addition to introducing appropriate incentives and organizational spaces that support the use of new research frameworks.
Proposed sub-IDO 2: Enhanced capacity to implement research along CRP impact pathways
The reformed CGIAR is expected to engage in research to achieve development outcomes rather than only to produce research outputs. This requires developing the capacity of the CGIAR CRPs, Centres and partners to interact in new ways to conduct research in development along the jointly defined pathways toward impact. The capacities of the individual implementation team members and of each team as a whole to accomplish their tasks need to be enhanced in order to enable the achievement of the necessary research outputs and of the desired development outcomes. These teams should look at all nine elements of capacity development outlined in the CGIAR Capacity Development Framework for the second round of CRPs and identify the right mix for their specific purposes.
Proposed sub-IDO 3: Enhanced capacity of system actors to innovate
Reorienting the dynamics of systems in favor of realizing desirable outcomes for the rural poor is essentially about changing the way people interact with each other and respond to their changing environment. This requires capabilities at the level of individuals, communities, organizations and networks, and those that have a mandate to catalyze and support innovation processes in society.
This requires improved capacity of systems actors to:
1. identify and prioritize systems problems and opportunities;
2. invest, test, experiment and adapt;
3. assess trade offs between alternative social and technical options; network, learn and share knowledge; and
4. collaborate and partner.
Working with Strategic partners (SLU, Wageningen), national and regional partners, be more intentional and systematic about how we support, develop and fund Capacity Development initiatives aimed at developing future leaders in research (through fellowships). As continue to look at capacity development from a broader sense, we should not forget the place, relevance and impact of individual capacity development.
1. Heavy reliance on bilateral projects in the value chains to deliver on program outputs.
2. Lack of a business perspective on the value chain approach. For each intervention selected, there should be clear value propositions for the value chain or node of the value chain.
The communication on results and impact is not very clear, neither on how it all fits into a theory of change and how it affects of will affect the lives of smallholder farmers.
- The CRP was a hypothesis that needed testing. Therefore, we need to better assess/appreciate/document the impact we are having at ground level
- We work with proof of concept. Therefore, we need to better appreciate the bigger learning (across VCs or commodities) so that our experiences can be generalized and our work or models can be scaled out.
The program seems to be lagging on a broader research agenda on social, economic and institutional research. Interesting, disconnected pieces of research are being carried out in the individual value chains, however there is no clear research agenda that guides this work across the value chains and provides a coherent framework for cross-VC comparisons and learning, and preparation of high quality global science products.
Hi to all. Here is Jacobo Arango from CIAT using the account of Stefan as I was not able to register.
I think we can do better in integrating all of these "scattered" research at the scientific level, this means share of methodologies, hypothesis, observations etc. The Naivasha meeting would have been a prime opportunity to do this type of exchange.
I like the VC approach as it theoretically should give fast impact and assessable effects of research-based interventions. However,
- Given that the VC approach is the driver in LnF and based on the observations of the sometimes weak connection between flagships as well as between flagships and VCs,could one be heretic and say that the flagship-construct are CG-business as usual?
- Could the comparative advantage of VC in for showing results (and ultimately impact) be better used? Or is it too early ? - at least it is somewhat hidden I think!
We are not good in securing funds for program/projects that can deal with all segments across the value chains.
I agree that cross flagship interaction is poor. I am not sure if there is much value to extensive interaction between the forage/feeds teams and animal health or genetics, but we can and should increase our interactions with the folks leading the value chain work!! Our forages team at CIAT HQ is technically very good, but we don't have boots on the ground interacting with producers on a daily basis. We need to talk to agronomists and social scientists involved in the VCs in order to set appropriate targets.
We still do not have a critical mass of staff based within the value chains
It would be good to have L&F seminars to see progress and to foster more value chain thinking.