Evaluation of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC): Final Report
Abstract
The Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) was set-up in 2005 with funding from DFID in response to increasing interest in learning how to promote policy reform to stimulate pro-poor and pro-growth agricultural transformation in Africa. FAC does this by contracting pieces of research, by convening conferences and research exchange events on topical issues, synthesising research into policy useful formats, hosting a variety of research outputs on its website and actively communicating information to decision makers. FAC’s research is characterised by a political economy approach; providing a framework to understand the policies that are “politically feasible” in different contexts, why decisions are made and with what effect.
The focus of this evaluation, which covers the period 2008-2013, was on understanding the pathways from high quality outputs to policy and practice change outcomes and impacts, and what can be learnt from the FAC experience in relation to these. The objectives were to:
- Assess the relevance of FAC’s policy research and communication work to agricultural policy in Africa;
- Document lessons from FAC, and accordingly, make recommendations and/or outline options for commissioning agricultural policy research
- Assess FAC’s performance with respect to the achievement of logframe indicators.
Part A of this report covers the evaluation background (including methodology and impact case study summaries). Part B presents the evaluation findings. Part C covers the evaluation learning and recommendations.
This record provides links to the full report with all 9 appendices (281 pp.; 7 MB) as well as to individual pdfs for the main report (79 pp.; 3.7 MB), appendices (204 pp.; 5 MB), and executive summary (5 pp.; 0.4 MB).
Citation
Upper Quartile. Evaluation of the Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC): Final Report. Upper Quartile, Edinburgh, UK (2014) 281 pp.