Challenges for smallholder market access: a review of literature on institutional arrangements in collective marketing

Purpose of the review: This review presents recent research on collective action in agricultural markets, focusing on the institutional settings that increase market access for smallholder farmers. It focuses attention on challenging research areas that try to understand and resolve the inherent contradictions that exist between members in the group and between the group and others. Findings: Collective action in agricultural markets is facilitated by institutional arrangements that effectively resolve the inherent tensions within groups as well as between farmers and other economic agents. Research explores the logic of collective marketing and the impact of trust and reputation on the mediation of opportunistic action in groups. Special attention is given to institutional arrangements on the interface between vertical and horizontal coordination in food chains, especially related to strategies of producer organisations to by-pass middlemen, to meet quality requirements in modern markets and to effectively use postharvest technologies. Research points to the importance of formal and informal rules and regulations in enabling farmers’ organisations to bulk and process agricultural products. Directions for future research: Informed decision making by value chain actors on replicating or upscaling institutional arrangements to improve the performance of their value chain needs information on its social embeddedness and its relation with the legal environment. More comparative research is needed on “workable models” and “best practices” for facilitating collaborative marketing in developing countries.farmers’ organisations; markets; cooperatives, bulking; opportunistic behaviour; enabling policies

Improving Knowledge, Inputs and Markets for Legume Expansion: A Contribution Analysis of N2Africa in Ghana and Ethiopia

This report documents the findings of an evaluation study of the impacts of N2Africa, a ten-year ‘research-in-development’ project that aimed to harness nitrogen fixation for the benefit of small-scale farmers of legume crops. The study analysed N2Africa’s contribution to development outcomes using the methodology of process tracing as a structured way of critically reviewing the change process. The evaluation focused on N2Africa’s activities in Ghana and Ethiopia. In Ghana, the evaluators examined the evidence base underlying the contribution claim, ‘N2Africa has been a relevant contributory factor in the expansion of soybean production in northern Ghana’. In Ethiopia, they verified the claim that ‘N2Africa has contributed to the increase in production, distribution, uptake and expansion of market demand for legume inoculants’. The evaluation identified the critical causal assumptions underlying the project’s Theory of Change in each case. After reviewing available project documentation and other literature, additional data were gathered through stakeholder interviews. The study sought to verify whether the expected changes had taken place, and assessed the size and importance of N2Africa’s contribution to each of the observed outcomes. The study found convincing evidence that N2Africa contributed substantially to a process of technological upgrading of soybean production in northern Ghana, yet the project played a relatively small part in the overall increase in soybean production in that region. In Ethiopia, there was clear evidence that N2Africa had made a decisive contribution to expanding the production and supply of legume inoculants, and had stimulated awareness of and demand for inoculants among small numbers of legume farmers. However, the project has only helped the market for legume inoculants to reach a small fraction of its potential.Bill and Melinda Gates Foundatio

Empowering smallholder farmers in markets: Experiences with farmer-led research for advocacy

Providing insight into the use of advocacy strategies and collaborative research by national farmer organisations, this title examines how these can be applied to strengthen the voice of smallholder farmers and formulate proposals for change. Clearly set out with a wealth of tables, examples and resources, the book describes the dynamics in 11 countries included in the ESFIM programme between 2008 and 2013. The diverse themes range from collective marketing to gathering evidence on the impact of seed programmes, and from electronic trading systems to the hurdles that prevent smallholders from selling to government procurement programme

Credible evidence on complex change processes: key challenges in impact evaluation on agricultural value chains.

Although a growing field of policy intervention, the effectiveness of public-private value chain support is regularly questioned in the policy realm. Partly resulting from stronger pressures on aid money to show its worth, convincing evidence is asked for the effect on poverty alleviation. However, impact evaluations of interventions are challenging: outcome indicators are often multi-dimensional, impact is generated in dynamic and open systems and the external validity of conclusions are often limited, due to contextual particularities. Therefore, there is a strong case for theory-based evaluation where logic models indicate how the intervention is expected to influence the incentives for people’s behaviour. The key assumptions inherent in these casual models can be tested through observation and measurement of specific outcome indicators, using mixed methods in triangulation. The mix of methods will have to anticipate the major threats to validity to the type of evaluative conclusion that the evaluation is expected to generate .Following the work of Shadish, Cook and Campbell (2002), validity threats relate to: 1) statistical conclusion validity; 2) internal validity; 3) construct validity; and, 4) external validity. The authors propose the combined use of data-set observations and causal-process observations in a comparative case-study design, based on critical realist concept of contextmechanism-outcome configurations. The use of a realist method to describe and analyze intervention pilots, facilitates the exchange of experiences between development agencies with evidence-based research. Its defined generalisation domain may prevent uncritical embracement of good practices. Certain value chain upgrading strategies may be viable and effective in a range of situations but are not the panacea, the standard solution, for creating market access; they all involve specific institutional arrangements that ‘fire’ specific mechanisms and incentives that depend on the institutional environment and social capital of stakeholders involved

Credible evidence on complex change processes: key challenges in impact evaluation on agricultural value chains.

Although a growing field of policy intervention, the effectiveness of public-private value chain support is regularly questioned in the policy realm. Partly resulting from stronger pressures on aid money to show its worth, convincing evidence is asked for the effect on poverty alleviation. However, impact evaluations of interventions are challenging: outcome indicators are often multi-dimensional, impact is generated in dynamic and open systems and the external validity of conclusions are often limited, due to contextual particularities. Therefore, there is a strong case for theory-based evaluation where logic models indicate how the intervention is expected to influence the incentives for people’s behaviour. The key assumptions inherent in these casual models can be tested through observation and measurement of specific outcome indicators, using mixed methods in triangulation. The mix of methods will have to anticipate the major threats to validity to the type of evaluative conclusion that the evaluation is expected to generate .Following the work of Shadish, Cook and Campbell (2002), validity threats relate to: 1) statistical conclusion validity; 2) internal validity; 3) construct validity; and, 4) external validity. The authors propose the combined use of data-set observations and causal-process observations in a comparative case-study design, based on critical realist concept of contextmechanism-outcome configurations. The use of a realist method to describe and analyze intervention pilots, facilitates the exchange of experiences between development agencies with evidence-based research. Its defined generalisation domain may prevent uncritical embracement of good practices. Certain value chain upgrading strategies may be viable and effective in a range of situations but are not the panacea, the standard solution, for creating market access; they all involve specific institutional arrangements that ‘fire’ specific mechanisms and incentives that depend on the institutional environment and social capital of stakeholders involved

Understanding Children’s Harmful Work: A Review of the Methodological Landscape

Children’s engagement with work has been widely researched using a wide variety of methods. However, the extent to which such methods and their combination provides insight into forms of children’s harmful work (CHW) is not obvious. This paper reviews and assesses respective opportunities and challenges of the main methods that have been used to study children’s engagement with work. It proposes research design principles and a methodological landscape for an integrated approach to child-centred, inclusive, and ethical research of CHW

COVID Policy and Urban Food Markets in Peru: Governance and Compliance

Urban food markets are essential channels of food distribution and spaces of social interaction where COVID-19 could be easily transmitted. The Peruvian government used budget incentives to motivate local governments to implement social distancing and food safety measures in these markets. Two surveys, in May and November 2020, show that municipality-owned markets had better compliance than privately or vendor-owned markets, especially with vendor protection measures and common space adaptations. Qualitative interviews helped to identify plausible causal mechanisms that explain this finding. Local governments perceived legal restrictions to investing public funds in privately owned markets, while vendor-owned markets faced agency dilemmas and opportunistic behaviour in decision-making about the required collective investments. We argue that a small-grants or loan facility specifically targeted at vendor-owned markets could have reduced these governance challenges and improved compliance. Peru’s budget incentive policy to support food market governance could inspire other countries to design appropriate policy instruments for food safety and public health

Contribution Analysis and Estimating the Size of Effects: Can We Reconcile the Possible with the Impossible?

While contribution analysis provides a step-by-step approach to verify whether and why an intervention is a contributory factor to development impact, most contribution analysis studies do not quantify the ‘share of contribution’ that can be attributed to a particular support intervention. Commissioners of evaluations, however, often want to understand the size or importance of a contribution, not least for accountability purposes. The easy (and not necessarily incorrect) response to this question would be to say that it is impossible to do so. However, in this CDI Practice Paper written by Giel Ton, John Mayne, Thomas Delahais, Jonny Morell, Barbara Befani, Marina Apgar and Peter O’Flynn, we explore how contribution analysis can be stretched so that it can give some sense of the importance of a contribution in a quantitative manner. The first part of the paper introduces the approach of contribution analysis and presents ideas to capture the change process in theories of change and system maps. The second part presents research design elements that include ranking or quantitative measures of impact in the verification of the theory of change and resulting contribution story

Social Protection Intervention: Evaluation Research Design

This paper describes the research design for investigating and evaluating the Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) social protection cash-plus intervention in a slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh. After an introductory section, the second section elaborates on contribution analysis – the methodological approach underpinning the research design. The third section provides an overview of the intervention, and the fourth explores the overall design of the evaluation, its guiding framework, and the timeline of the intervention rollout and data collection. The fifth and sixth sections address the project’s suite of quantitative and qualitative methods, and the approach to data analysis. Using four panel surveys, bi-monthly monitoring, in-depth interviews, group discussions and direct observations, the research will zoom in on specific behaviours. First, at the individual level, we want to learn how people adopt alternative livelihoods in response to the intervention. Second, at the household level, we consider how community mobilisation and cash transfers help households to resolve intra‑household problems. Third, at the group level, we consider how groups manage collective action in response to community mobilisation. For each of these behaviour change outcomes, we want to understand the realist evaluation question, ‘Why does the intervention work, for whom, and under what conditions?’ We also want to assess whether these new behaviours change the propensity for children to be involved in the worst forms of child labour