Question: How many farmers does the Feed the Future initiative benefit worldwide?

Short Answer:  No one knows.

Any number that a Feed the Future activity reports is very likely to be an underestimate of the actual number of farmers reached and potentially benefitting from that activity.  Here’s why.  Farmers are systematically undercounted by the existing monitoring and evaluation methods used by agricultural market systems development projects.

As Kristin O’Planick pointed out in her recent blog post, USAID has been evolving to a market system facilitation approach to achieve scale as well as more resilient and sustainable development. The flagship Feed the Future initiative has been one of the leaders at USAID in adopting this approach. But as O’Planick also indicated, the new emphasis on facilitation has implications for several operational areas, especially for monitoring and evaluation, which she called a “fraught issue.”

As a recent discussion paper by USAID pointed out, “the facilitation approach focuses on creating widespread, systemic change without direct intervention in a system.” In an agricultural market systems activity, facilitation means that the implementer follows a strategy of collaborating with market actors who are linked to target beneficiaries through commercial relationships.  Therefore implementers often do not have direct contact with the target beneficiaries. Activities may also demonstrate successful models and practices to encourage copying by farmers and other market actors. 

One of the main attractions of the facilitation approach is its ability to reach large numbers of beneficiaries. But the very means by which this occurs make it challenging to determine how many people are actually reached, both directly and indirectly.  

Given the importance of outreach to achieving inclusive economic growth at scale for farmers, Elizabeth Dunn and I set out to explore the existing evidence on smallholder outreach in agricultural market systems facilitation activities. We found that:

• There is no one USAID indicator that measures total outreach to farmers.
• The reported outreach numbers primarily focus on smallholders who are direct beneficiaries.  
• Outreach numbers do not distinguish between farmers who come into personal contact with the activity (i.e., primary contacts) and those reached through their relationships with market actors (i.e., secondary contacts). Published reports rarely provide sufficient information to allow separate estimations of primary and secondary contacts, although we know that with facilitation approaches most smallholders reached are secondary contacts.
• Only a few implementing partners reported trying to measure indirect beneficiary smallholders.

Most of the USAID-funded activities we researched had developed a custom indicator to count total outreach. However, because the indicator definitions varied so much, it made no sense to compare outreach across activities. For example, in some cases, the indicator measured households, in others, individual farmers.

Our research found that the most complete evidence on Feed the Future farmer outreach comes from two standard indicators:

• Number of farmers and others who have applied new technologies or management practices as a result of US government assistance.
• Number of individuals who have received US government supported short-term agricultural sector productivity or food security training.

At best, these measures only approximate total direct outreach to farmers. The farmer groups represented by each indicator may or may not overlap, and both indicators also count individuals who are not farmers. In addition, there may be farmers who directly benefit from an Feed the Future activity, but who do not apply a new technology/practice or participate in training and thus are not captured in the number.

The importance of distinguishing farmers as secondary contacts in market systems development projects is that it highlights the extent to which farmers are reached through facilitation rather than through personal contact with activity staff or services. The methods used to measure secondary contact farmers range from traditional approaches, such as attendance or participant lists, to newer methods that rely on obtaining data from commercial partners in the value chain through customer lists or databases. The facilitation approach in fact means that activities will be increasingly reliant on commercial partners within the value chain to track outreach, as the implementers themselves have little to no contact with farmers.

Given the importance of attracting indirect beneficiaries as a means for achieving systemic change, it is surprising that few Feed the Future activities mention demonstration effects or imitation in their documents. Copying, or imitation, is both a key to large scale outreach and also an indicator of systemic change.

The few examples of measuring indirect smallholder outreach included these:

• AMDe in Ethiopia estimated indirect outreach by counting members of farmer cooperatives who did not attend a project-sponsored activity. Presumably, the non-attendees will copy the new practices from the attendees.
• NAFAKA in Tanzania and Ag Inputs in Uganda estimated indirect smallholder outreach by estimating the numbers reached by behavior change communications and radio programs, respectively. It is important to note that numbers of beneficiaries reached through radio are not counted in the Feed the Future standard indicators.   

More interesting examples of attempts to measure indirect smallholder outreach come from DFID-supported projects, which used customer referrals and sales data to generate estimates of the number of farmers copying promoted technologies and practices. (See the full report here.)

While these nascent measurement methods show promise, more needs to be done to address the systematic undercounting of farmers in agricultural market systems facilitation projects. Donors, including USAID, need to:

• Encourage experimentation with new measurement approaches.
• Encourage implementers to report on total outreach to target beneficiaries while also requiring separate measures for primary contact, secondary contact and copying smallholders.
• Develop standard indicators of outreach which can allow comparison of outreach results across multiple projects.

The facilitation approach to market systems development is believed to be key to achieving large-scale inclusive economic growth.  With the right measures, we can learn exactly how large a scale is possible.