Skill Needs and Policies for Agriculture-led Pro-poor Development

Poverty reduction is the mantra of development policies today. Three out of every four people in the developing world live in rural areas, either directly or indirectly depending on agriculture. Agriculture-led development strategies need to be at the core of any poverty reduction strategy, as agroindustralisation, i.e. the transition towards more commercialised agriculture systems, can bear positive effects for the poor, such as off-farm employment creation and stimulated economic growth in general. In order to reap these potential benefits, it is crucial to address the specific skill needs that occur at different levels of agroindustrialisation. Currently, agricultural education and training (AET) systems fail to respond to these challenges, which is reflected in a high fragmentation of AET systems in the developing world and a lack of donor initiatives in middle-level training projects. Evidence from developing and developed countries reveal that skill strategies need to be integrated into a coherent rural development strategy that aims at addressing the important constraints to agriculture-led development, which are widespread, especially in low developed economies.

Growth and the Investment Climate: Progress and Challenges for Asian Economies

The views and opinions of authors expressed in this paper do not necessarily state or reflect those of DFID or the Asia 2015 organisers.

Payment by results in international development: Evidence from the first decade

Payment by results is a relatively new way of giving development aid, where a recipient's performance against pre-agreed measures determines the amount of aid they receive. Advocates for the mechanism argue it provides donors with both a ready justification for maintaining aid budgets and better results through innovation and autonomy. It has proved popular, with most bilateral aid donors having at least experimented with the mechanism and the variety of measures stretching from individual health workers being paid for each procedure, to national governments being paid for students' test scores. However, there has not been a robust assessment of whether Payment By Results (PbR) achieves its aims for greater effectiveness. I synthesize the evidence from eight projects fully or partially funded by DFID, the recognized world leader on PbR. This represents the best evidence currently available, and is critically analysed using the leading theoretical framework that breaks each agreement into its constituent parts. I find no evidence that PbR leads to fundamentally more innovation or autonomy, with the overall range of success and failure broadly similar to other aid projects. This may partly be due to the current use of Payment by Results, with no readily identifiable examples of projects that truly meet the idealized PbR designs. Advocates of PbR may thus conclude the idea is yet to be tested. I argue PbR does not deal with the fundamental constraints that donors face, and so it is unsurprising that PbR is subject to the normal pressures that affect all aid spending

Changing the Financial Landscape of Africa: An Unusual Story of Evidence?informed Innovation, Intentional Policy Influence and Private Sector Engagement

This article uses the Steven Framework to show the influence of research on the policies and practices of mobile money transfer and mobile phone?enabled payments in Africa. While it is a much?discussed subject, few people know the wider narrative by which products such as M?Pesa were intentionally championed from outside the mobile phone industry. This championing was part of a much broader intentional strategy to change the landscape of financial service provision in Africa and to decrease the cost of international remittances. The origins of this strategy are to be found in research on the emerging behaviours associated with mobile phone use in Africa. There is an increasing call for evidence?based policymaking. The M?Pesa story shows a clear example of research informing (and thereby contributing to) policy development