Subscribe IFPRI on Impact Assessment

IFPRI provides high-quality, policy-oriented research to help to improve food policies in developing countries. There is a high demand for evidence on whether research has led to desired policy changes and whether those policy changes in turn have led to desired economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Hence, to assess the policy impact of its research more systematically, IFPRI launched a coordinated impact assessment effort in 1996 with the following objectives:

• To ensure that IFPRI's work remains relevant and useful in a rapidly changing world.
• To provide evidence to IFPRI’s clients that their investments are worthwhile and returns are competitive with investments in other CGIAR centers and elsewhere.
• To ensure IFPRI’s credibility and accountability to its clients.
• To help IFPRI learn from its own experience about what works best and how to better manage projects in the future.
• To contribute to the global evidence base on returns to investments in policy research, capacity strengthening, and communications related to reducing poverty, hunger, and malnutrition and achieving other developmental goals.

IFPRI has a dedicated impact assessment unit, within the Director General’s Office, working on achieving these challenging objectives by taking the following actions in three important areas:

• Conduct integrated assessments of IFPRI's past research at the country level and across themes, including completed lines of research that have not yet been evaluated, to assess how IFPRI's work influences country-level and international policy-making processes.
• Help projects, at the initiation stage, to build up an evidence base over their lifetime that will allow for better ex-post impact assessments.
• Advance the ability to measure the payoffs of policy-oriented social science research and develop better tools for and approaches to creating plausible impact narratives.

The impact assessment unit currently coordinates ex-post impact assessments and other impact-related research activities. An external impact assessment coordinator oversees the process and all impact assessments are led by externally commissioned experts. Draft reports are peer reviewed by internal and external reviewers and the results are presented at IFPRI seminars that are open to all staff. Final reports are published in an ongoing series of IFPRI discussion papers on impact assessment, and the results are summarized and highlighted on the IFPRI impact assessment webpage. IFPRI’s impact assessment efforts so far have led to the publication of numerous impact assessment briefs, reports, and books.

IFPRI’s impact assessment actions align more broadly with the objectives of the Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA), a sub-group of the CGIAR Independent Science and Partnership Council. SPIA documents the impact of policy-oriented research across CGIAR centers and advances methods for assessing the policy impact of research.