1.
Socio-Technical Innovation
Bundles for Agri-Food
Systems Transformation:
Implications for impact
assessment in One CGIAR &
country-level experience
Karen Macours
Paris School of Economics
INRAE
SPIA (Standing Panel on
Impact Assessment) CGIAR
karen.macours@psemail.eu
1

2.
How to measure impact of AR4D with move to innovation
bundles for AFS transformation?
• Lots of Historical evidence on yield-enhancing innovations playing an
important role in reducing poverty …. and more, but with trade-offs
• Are those answers still relevant today?
– No, different innovations to respond to challenges of today’s world =>
innovation bundles (Barrett et al, 2020)
– Trade-offs and need to understand impacts in multiple domains =>
increase need for rigorous causal evidence
• New questions => Rigorous impact studies to advise on modalities for scaling
– E.g. with technology bundles, how to adapt scaling mechanisms to
characteristics of innovation (ongoing SPIA studies)
– E.g. providing menu of options rather than training on individual
technologies => ICRAF’s farmer-to-trainer cascade model in Uganda
(Behaghel, Gignoux, Macours, 2020)
– Multitude of outcomes of interest call for new metrics & measurement
innovations
– Magnitude of challenge means we need evidence of reach at scale

3.
Shining a Brighter Light at the country level
https://cas.cgiar.org/spia 3
• Systematically and factually document CGIAR
reach across crop, livestock and natural research
management
=> necessary, if not sufficient, for impact
• Ethiopia: Almost all CGIAR centers/CRPs active
=> other countries to follow
• Stocktaking of last 2 decades of research by
CGIAR and national partners
=> 52 innovations and 26 policy influences
• Novel data protocols and methods incorporated
in Ethiopia Socioeconomic Survey (ESS)
=> representative and at scale
=> objective & independent measures
• Through partnership with CSA and World Bank
Bit.ly/SPIA-Ethiopia

4.
Innovations from different CGIAR research domains have
scaled, but many innovations have not
https://cas.cgiar.org/spia 4
Number of
rural HHs
adopting
each
CGIAR-
related
innovation
(millions)
Based on ESS 4 only (not including wheat and haricot beans)

5.
https://cas.cgiar.org/spia 5
• Relatively few innovations reaching large numbers of households
• Widespread adoption of recent agricultural innovations
• When considering portfolio of innovations, instead of single innovations
=> One CGIAR
• Many innovations are not disproportionately more likely to be adopted by
male, larger, richer, more educated or more connected farmers
• Good news for contributing to end rural poverty
• But certain innovations not reaching target households & regions
• Representative estimates of the “who, where and when” of diffusion can
help in process of re-evaluating Theories of Change (ToC)
• Where and for whom are scaling efforts working?
• Why? Synergies between biophysical and policy research?
• Where/for whom are the bottlenecks proving to be too constraining?
Main take-aways from national-level data in Ethiopia