First in a series of blog posts reviewing IFPRI’s work and its impacts over a half-century.
As IFPRI marks its 50th anniversary, the Institute and its key stakeholders pause to take stock of what we know about its policy influence and impact over the years. What does the available evidence tell us about IFPRI’s achievements as an international research institution? Have its activities contributed to better policy and investment decisions by governments, development agencies, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, and others involved in the economic and social development of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)?
To answer these questions, we reviewed a wealth of available external evidence about IFPRI’s performance, comprising bibliometric data and 45 independent assessments commissioned by IFPRI, its partners, or investors over the past 30 years. While some of these assessments lack scientific rigor and must be viewed with some caution, they reflect the independent judgments of external experts, based on careful study of the available evidence. As the report only relies on independent assessments, it does not include very recent impacts, such as the influence of IFPRI’s country-level and global analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Brief history
When IFPRI was initially founded in 1975, it was a small institute made up of about 20 senior research staff. Its research program was developed around a few global policy issues with the intent of generating new knowledge products, often called international public goods, which would be valuable to most LMICs. As its agenda broadened, IFPRI developed multicountry and global research programs, in which international public goods were addressed through carefully selected country case studies. Research priorities continued to be set in Washington, DC, however, as with the Institute’s early work.
As IFPRI’s reputation and influence spread, the Institute became more involved in research driven at country and regional levels, which was not directly linked to international public goods. By 2003, this work had evolved into a decentralization strategy that placed many senior staff in country and regional offices to undertake demand-driven research. By January 2025, one-third of IFPRI’s approximately 140 senior research staff were outposted to 14 countries and three regional offices. Much of this work was undertaken within the context of country programs that took a more holistic approach to supporting countries’ development strategies and strengthening their policy research capacities.
IFPRI’s performance as a research institution
IFPRI’s publications and international recognition clearly demonstrate its success as a research institution. Over the past 50 years, the Institute has published about 4,000 articles in journals tracked by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI); of these, nearly two-thirds were published in the past decade. These publications are generally well cited and downloaded, and the 10 most cited ISI-tracked journal papers each year attract significant international attention, as measured by their Altmetric scores. IFPRI publishes about 1,000 other outputs each year, including papers, briefs, books, blogs, and thematic reports; many of these are also widely downloaded and cited. The Institute also makes many of its collected datasets freely available online. These datasets, which include many household surveys, have been downloaded more than 2.2 million times in the past decade.
Since 2002, three IFPRI staff members have been awarded the World Food Prize for their work on the 2020 Vision Project, biofortification, and maternal and child undernutrition. In 2020, the Global Go To Think Tank Index ranked IFPRI 19th among the world’s international development think tanks. Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) rated IFPRI number one among all agricultural economics departments and in the field of agricultural economics, and fifth in the field of development. IFPRI has also been successful in attracting and collaborating with a large array of partners at all stages of its impact pathways, including research collaborators from top universities and research centers around the world.
IFPRI’s policy influence and impact
To assess how well IFPRI’s research has translated into policy influence and impact, we relied on available independent assessments. There are no such assessments of IFPRI’s early work on international public goods or of some recent and ongoing research, as noted above. Taken together, however, the available assessments cover the majority of IFPRI’s other work. Additionally, most independent assessments covered research programs that involved many projects. Given this broad coverage, there was little room for selectivity bias in our review.
Assessing the impact of policy research presents many challenges, including demonstrating that research actually influenced policy decisions and assessing the economic and welfare outcomes of those decisions, as compared to a relevant counterfactual. Impact pathways are shorter and more clearly defined for some types of research than for others.
The clearest demonstration of impact comes from independent assessments of how IFPRI’s research informed the design of social safety nets and nutrition programs. The impact of these programs—whose implementing agencies worked directly with IFPRI—was demonstrated through randomized controlled trials or other experimental designs. Outstanding examples include IFPRI’s research on the conditional cash transfer program Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud, y Alimentación (PROGRESA) in Mexico and the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) in Ethiopia; in both cases, evaluations demonstrated substantial economic and welfare gains from the programs. Other major examples include IFPRI’s work on rice market reforms in Viet Nam, support to Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA), work on priorities for public investment in India and China, the Central American common market (CAFTA), and several other safety net and nutrition programs.
Assessing the impact of international public goods is particularly fraught, given their long and widely diffused impact pathways, and available assessments are largely limited to assessing influence as measured by bibliometric data and stakeholder surveys. International public goods that have been independently assessed include conference and advocacy activities (such as the 2020 Vision Project), the development of innovative indicators to inform policy (the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators, or ASTI, and the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, or WEAI), modeling tools and methods (computable general equilibrium models, foresight models, and casual impact evaluation), and datasets that are freely accessible to users around the world (Statistics on Public Expenditures for Economic Development, or SPEED, and country-level social accounting matrixes ). IFPRI also undertook research on international trade to support the World Trade Organization’s Doha trade negotiations from 1999 to 2008. In all cases, the independent assessments established plausible evidence of influence at international levels, but there were no assessments of economic impact.
Overall, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that IFPRI has been a successful catalyst for change, with enough estimates of economic impact to suggest the returns to IFPRI’s investments are likely large.
Assessments of IFPRI’s capacity-strengthening work
IFPRI’s capacity-strengthening work is a vital complement to its research agenda that helps to build capacity at country and regional levels for undertaking, communicating, and utilizing evidence-based policy research. In the Institute’s early years, capacity-strengthening activities mostly took the form of training individuals through collaborative research on specific projects, and early assessments found that this “learning-by-doing” approach was appreciated and effective (Ryan 1999; Babu 2000).
As IFPRI evolved and became more involved in country and regional policy issues, its capacity-strengthening activities expanded to include formal training courses, the establishment and support of regional policy networks to reach more countries facing common policy issues, support for university students at postgraduate levels, and training of postdoctoral fellows at IFPRI. After 2003, when IFPRI began to scale up its country programs and many of its staff were outposted, capacity-strengthening work in those countries became more strategic. This work was based on a needs-assessed approach to strengthen key national research and data-collecting institutions and government ministries. Independent assessments of this later work were mostly positive, finding that the local presence of outposted IFPRI staff had an important and positive bearing on the effectiveness of capacity-strengthening activities (Kuyvenhoven 2014; Behrman and Ghosh 2019).
Lessons for achieving greater impact
The independent assessments identify several factors that have contributed to IFPRI’s success in influencing policies. Foremost is the Institute’s decentralization strategy. The value of country-based staff was a common refrain in many of the assessments we reviewed, with several emphasizing that IFPRI has more influence on policy outcomes when there are embedded staff and close working relationships with local researchers, government departments, and policymakers. Where these are missing—or in some cases, lost—IFPRI’s influence weakens or wanes. In-country staff also provide a framework for IFPRI to influence policy by maintaining a consistent focus on important topics for long enough to engage policy advisers and policymakers.
Another factor is the need to articulate a deliberate strategy of influence from the beginning of a research project. Doing so can help to ensure demand for the research within the country and a sense of research project “ownership” within the policy circles that the research is designed to influence. The clearest way for IFPRI’s research to influence decisions is through involvement in an impact pathway or decision-making framework that is externally created, at least in part. The more formal priority-setting process involved in country programs can make this process easier, but developing in-country research partnerships is also important, including with researchers who can act as “champions” within local policy circles. Where government agencies have a research function, integrating them into the partnerships is recommended. One assessment report argues that advancing from research to actual policy change requires developing more finely targeted and actionable research along the impact pathway or relying on other applied policy research institutes, often with closer relationships with policymakers, to undertake such research.
Outreach and communication strategies are also considered critical for success and should be clarified early in a research project. Several different audiences for IFPRI’s research exist, including the broader research and donor communities, in-country policy communities, and field practitioners. Because information demands differ among these groups, catering to their needs requires strategies that go beyond publishing research findings or holding workshops.
Many of these findings are reinforced by an assessment of 18 stories of successful policy influence identified by IFPRI’s country program leaders. Despite variations in the types of research, outreach, and capacity-strengthening activities, all the cases showed the importance of having IFPRI’s researchers effectively embedded in the local policy ecosystem, establishing relationships of trust and credibility with key policymakers, having adequate financial resources and flexibility for responding to emerging and longer-term policy issues, and effectively communicating results to decision-makers.
Value of impact assessments
IFPRI has been unusually prolific in commissioning independent evaluations, but the funding for future evaluations seems less secure than ever. Independent assessments such as the Taking Stock report remain critical for assessing research impacts beyond possible policy influence, and for offering deeper lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a research program. They are also vital for funders making investment decisions, especially with a smaller pool of resources. Ultimately, continuing to invest in high-quality, objective impact assessment can help organizations ensure that they are fulfilling their mission in tumultuous times.
Peter Hazell is an IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Emeritus; Frank Place is a former IFPRI Senior Research Fellow.
