Agulhas, in partnership with Cowater and with the support of Wellspring Development, undertook an assignment to conduct the monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) of the UK’ Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)’s Just Rural Transition Support Programme (JRTSP). The MEL component assessed how well JRTSP supports large-scale transformation of agriculture and food systems by contributing to shifts from policies and practices that may drive environmental degradation, undermining food and economic security, to those that deliver “triple wins” for people, prosperity, and the planet, tackling climate change and improving food security and nutrition, jobs and incomes, operating across Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The project objectives included:
- Monitoring: To ensure that quality evidence is collected against the JRTSP log frame and for FCDO’s annual reviews, and to inform learning and evaluation activities
- Evaluation: To evaluate programme-level performance, likely impact and value for money, enabling learning and improvement in programme delivery.
- Learning: To generate new evaluative evidence and learning on effective approaches for achieving national policy reform.
As part of the learning workstream, the team produced three research products to improve the evidence base on effective interventions for sustainable agricultural policy reform.
The Rapid Evidence Review on approaches for agricultural subsidy repurposing and overall sustainable agricultural policy reform and the accompanying briefing synthesised the evidence on these topics, exploring relevant interventions as well as the enablers and barriers associated with them. It will support organisations working on agricultural reform to better identify effective interventions that lead to ‘triple wins’ in sustainable agriculture.
The policy brief, Repurposing agricultural subsidies to deliver a Just Rural Transition, delves deeper into the policy dimensions of agricultural subsidy reform. The brief explores five alternatives to agricultural input subsidies and their accompanying policy considerations. It suggests ways forward for donors and development partners and lays out the priority support areas to support future policy reform.
The products helped generate new evidence and learning on effective approaches to support countries to achieve national policy reform, including thematic studies on what works well (and not so well), for use by FCDO and others working on similar themes.
