The draft report of the CRP-Commissioned External Evaluation of the Program’s Value Chain Approach is now available for comment (more information on this evaluation). Comments are now closed.

The value chains work of the Livestock and Fish program is focused on animal-source food value chains in nine countries: smallholder dairy in Tanzania and India; pork in Uganda and Vietnam; small ruminants in Ethiopia and Burkina Faso; aquaculture in Egypt and Bangladesh; and dual purpose dairy-meat in Nicaragua. In each country, research for development (R4D) sites have been established to “serve as laboratories” for characterizing and assessing smallholder value chains, introducing and generating evidence on technological and institutional innovations, mobilizing resources needed to transform the selected value chains, and identifying strategies and mechanisms for scaling up.

The program focus on poor producers in the targeted countries and value chains created an important methodological challenge for the program’s value chains approach since there are weak market drivers, relatively little value addition and, in several locations, poor prospects for private sector investment or services provision. Another methodological challenge was the need to effectively engage wide ranging stakeholders in the process and mobilizes necessary resources for value chain transformation, while at the same demonstrating proof-of-concept for technological and technological innovations. The program had to develop a value chains approach for handling the above and other methodological challenges while piecing together funding from different pools of core and bilateral resources.

Because of the complexity and expectations faced in the development and implementation of the program’s value chains approach, the Program Planning and Management Committee commissioned an External Evaluation (CCEE) on the program’s value chains approach.

The draft evaluation report is now available to all stakeholders. The report was mailed for comment directly to:
1. CRP Management, including all value chain coordinators and program theme leaders,
2. Members of the Evaluation Reference Group (ERG), including the SPAC Representative to the group
3. Senior ILRI Managers
4. The Head of the CGIAR Independent Evaluation Arrangement

At this stage, I would like to invite all other stakeholders to review the document and make any comments that they feel should be communicated to the Evaluation Team in order to help them improve the finalized Evaluation Report, due 24 November, 2014 (see timeline below).

Comments and suggestions should sent to the Evaluation Manager, Keith Child (k.child@cgiar.org) by 17 November, 2014 at the latest (earlier submissions are both welcomed and encouraged).
Draft Evaluation Report
03 November 2014 — Final Draft is submitted to EM by the Lead Evaluator
04 November 2014 – The Draft is submitted to the CRP Director, the PPMC, the ERG, SPAC and IMC and a written response is solicited from each;
05 November 2014 – The draft is posted to the L&F Wiki and written responses are invited from stakeholders;
17 November 2014 – Deadline to receive all written responses to draft;
Finalized Evaluation Report
18 November 2014 – The EM will aggregate all written responses and submit them to the Lead Evaluator;
18 November 2014 to 23 November 2014 – The Evaluation Team revises the draft report;
24 November 2014 – The Finalized Evaluation Report is submitted to the EM, who immediately forwards it to the CRP Director, PPMC, ERG, ECB, SPAC, IEA and posts it to the L&F Wiki; the IEA will also post it to their website.