Call+for+impact+studies

Wageningen, 5 July 2011

Dear all active in the field of agricultural innovation in developing countries,

The Dutch Agricultural Economics Research Institute, (LEI, part of Wageningen University and Research Centre), has been contracted by the Australian Government (AusAid) to do a systematic review on the question **//“Is the provision of agricultural innovation grants to small holder agricultural producers effective in facilitating agricultural innovation, particularly in ways that benefit the poor and women in developing countries?”//** LEI is assisted in this review by an Advisory Board, formed by experts from other institutions: ETC (Ann Waters-Bayer), CIRAD (Bernard Triomphe), DIIS (Esbern Friis-Hansen) and KIT (Mariana Wongtschowski).

__What is a Systematic Review? __ Most reviews of research take the form of traditional literature reviews, which usually examine the results of only a small part of the research evidence. The key features of a systematic review or systematic research synthesis are that:

§ **//Explicit //** and **//transparent//** methods are used § It is a piece of research following a **//standard//** set of stages § It is **//accountable//**, **//replicable//** and **//updateable//** § There is a requirement of user involvement to ensure reports are **//relevant//** and **//useful//**

Systematic reviews aim to find as much as possible of the research relevant to the particular research questions, and use explicit methods to identify what can reliably be said on the basis of these studies. Methods should not only be explicit but systematic with the aim of producing varied and reliable results.

__What are innovation grants? __ In this phase, we use a broad definition of grant systems. We know that there exists a large diversity of grant systems. Generally, they use ‘vouchers’, ‘competitive funds’ or ‘matching grants’, though the wording differs quite a lot also between language communities.

__Why do we need your support? __ We discovered during the scoping study that only part of the information on impacts of grant systems has been published in the academic literature, and ‘pops up’ in the bibliographic searches. Additional, useful impact studies are likely to be ‘hidden’ in more comprehensive evaluation reports, filed in organisations, programmes and government branches. And, most importantly, impacts are often realized only some years after the grants are made, in older programs that are not searchable on the Internet. <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Through this mail, we want to ask your help in locating, this ‘hidden’ literature and written documentation on the impacts of innovation grants to smallholders in developing countries, especially the ones that are not published or externally distributed.

<span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Please forward this information or links to this information to: giel.ton@wur.nl and karin.degrip@wur.nl. We can manage documents in **English, French** and**Spanish**.

__<span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">What is the time frame? __ <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Based on our searches and your contributions, we will develop a structured approach that can be replicated and updated in the future, and that proves to be effective to get hold of the evidence available in the field. We aim to do so the coming weeks (July). We will continue the literature search based on this ‘protocol’ in September and October. <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">So, please respond as soon as possible, in July, so we can use the material to refine the search strategy and include the information in our review protocol. The review is expected to be completed in February 2012 and will be made available online via the 3IE website ([]) and will be distributed to all contributing networks, persons and organisations.

<span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">kind regards,

<span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Giel Ton <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Laurens Klerkx <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Karin de Grip <span style="font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'; font-size: 13px;">Marie Luise Rau

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