Evaluating Inclusive Transformation in Agriculture (EVITA)

The International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED) and International Trade and Development (ITAD) have partnered as a team for the EVITA Retrospective Policy Evaluation of Micro Reforms for African Agribusiness (MIRA) and Monitoring and Analyzing Food and Agriculture Policies (MAFAP) Recommended Reforms Assignment under the sponsorship of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), and in support of its Agricultural Development (AgDev) program. The objective of this assignment is to understand the extent to which African governments and their partners initiated, resourced, and sustained the implementation of specific policy and public investments, post adoption. The retrospective policy implementation learning exercise was conducted for the Micro Reforms for African Agribusiness (MIRA), and Monitoring and analyzing six Food and Agriculture Policies (MAFAP) programs, which were implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) respectively. MAFAP was funded over two implementation phases from 2009- 2019, while MIRA has undergone one implementation phase from 2013-2018. Implementation of policy advocacy initiatives for both MAFAP and MIRA programs ended at the point when governments either approved or did not approve recommended reforms. Since then, the Enabling Country Systems (ECS) team in the Agricultural Development unit of BMGF has not conducted any formal investigation to establish ensuing activities by governments and their partners, hence the commissioning of the current retrospective evaluation. The interest in post adoption implementation, which is outside the remit of MAFAP and MIRA programs, is in recognition that the programs’ ultimate impact lies in the implementation of reforms by national governments and their partners, post adoption. We adopted this as a guiding framework for our evaluation, including data collection and analysis. ICED played the lead role in this consortium assignment.