This open-source repository of models and tools for ex-ante impact assessment is part of the One CGIAR Initiative on Excellence in Agronomy (Vanlauwe and Casimero, 2021.
Scalability and scaling readiness (Woltering et al., 2019; Schut et al., 2020) requires understanding of socio-technical innovation bundles (Barrett et al., 2020) or innovation packages (Sartas et al., 2020). We follow the seven-step approach for taking an idea to a scalable innovation in philosophy pursued by Excellence in Agronomy. The decision-making at the end of each stage on whether to proceed, go back and revise or abort hinges on two criteria. The first criterion is if the innovation has a potential to fit into the relevant farming systems, livelihood strategies and local complex dynamic agri-food systems. The second criterion is if uptake of the innovation will lead to positive impact in the relevant impact areas and not lead to major negative externalities.
Ex-ante impact assessment with its future orientation has the potential to make important contributions to the stage-gating decisions and to providing insights for the use case teams through out the use case life cycle.
To assess the ex-ante impact of the (minimum viable product) MVP for the Use Case target area and target population in relation to the agronomic gain KPIs and the OneCGIAR impact areas.
- Develop, adapt and test viable methodological approaches of eaIA suitable for EiA use cases MVP
- Apply ex ante impact assessment (EAIA) itself through the use cases
- Building up an open source Toolbox for doing EAIA
The end of initiative outcome 4 to which the team contributes directly requires an operational toolset available to analyze available data in order to do:
- Understand uptake potential of agronomic innovations
- Understand possible accompanying interventions, innovations and policy changes as part of socio-technical innovation bundles.
- Calculate potential benefits across One CGIAR key impact areas.
- Inform prioritization of agronomic innovations
An openly accessible and available ex-ante impact assessment toolset that can provide the information on bullet points 1-3 is expected at the end of the Initiative. Because this is needed from day 1, the toolset will be made available on a rolling basis in close collaboration with the use-cases and building on existing open access ex-ante impact assessment frameworks that will be repurposed to fit the EiA philosophy.
The toolset developed by the ex-ante impact assessment team will be the fall-back option. Use cases that have other tools and models for doing the same type of analysis that are more appropriate for that particular use case will use those tools. For comparability purposes, monitoring and evaluation, a common set of indicators and guidelines on provision of documentation on the indicators and how they are derived needs to be available.
The toolset is a modular modeling framework encompassing tools in scripting languages such as R, Python, AWK and GAMS that will use well-defined data standards to allow for easy data interchange between the different tools. Data used will be accompanied by rich metadata in standardized formats.
The toolset and its modules will be transparent, and well documented. The ex-ante impact assessment team uses the modeling philosophy of strictly separating calculation rules, input data and user settings. This allows for maximum transparency and reproducibility.
work in progress
Barrett, C. B., Benton, T. G., Cooper, K. A., Fanzo, J., Gandhi, R., Herrero, M., et al. (2020). Bundling innovations to transform agri-food systems. Nat. Sustain. 3, 974–976. doi:10.1038/s41893-020-00661-8.
Sartas, M., Schut, M., Proietti, C., Thiele, G., and Leeuwis, C. (2020). Scaling Readiness: Science and practice of an approach to enhance impact of research for development. Agric. Syst. 183. doi:10.1016/J.AGSY.2020.102874.
Schut, M., Leeuwis, C., and Thiele, G. (2020). Science of Scaling: Understanding and guiding the scaling of innovation for societal outcomes. Agric. Syst. 184, 102908. doi:10.1016/J.AGSY.2020.102908.
Vanlauwe, B., and Casimero, M. (2021). Excellence in Agronomy for Sustainable Intensification and Climate Change Adaptation (EiA). Available at: https://storage.googleapis.com/cgiarorg/2021/10/INIT11-Excellence-in-Agronomy-for-Sustainable-Intensification-and-Climate-Change-Adaptation-EiA-pdf.pdf.
Woltering, L., Fehlenberg, K., Gerard, B., Ubels, J., and Cooley, L. (2019). Scaling – from “reaching many” to sustainable systems change at scale: A critical shift in mindset. Agric. Syst. 176. doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2019.102652.