CGIAR

Lots of exciting news and progress is being reported by CGIAR’s Portfolio Performance Unit (PPU) and its Innovation Packages and Scaling Readiness IPSR workstream.

The Technical Report is out

Arguably first and foremost is the CGIAR 2022 Technical Report that is now out. Requiring an ‘epic’ amount of work led by Nicoleta Trifa, CGIAR’s monitoring, evaluation and learning advisor, the report is already receiving accolades. It comprehensively covers CGIAR’s greater organizational coherence and closer partnerships, the impacts of its initiatives, and improvements to its internal practices and reporting methods. One component, the Portfolio Narrative, describes the results, partnerships, engagements, and synergies of CGIAR’s broad portfolio, drawing together 2022 data and narratives from the pooled-funded CGIAR Results Dashboard, the 32 Initiative and Impact Area Platform 2022 annual reports, and the Internal Practice Change 2022 Report. Strategic collaborations with nearly 2,000 of CGIAR’s active partners across 126 countries helped to co-design and co-deliver the work reported here.

For more information, please contact Nicoleta at n.trifa [at] cgiar.org

PPU—Doing something right

The data collection machine built by CGIAR’s Portfolio Performance Unit (PPU)—‘the new kid on the CGIAR block’ (it was put together just over a year ago)—is complete, is now being optimized, and is already making waves. As PPU head Jules Colomer reports, ‘We’ve had more interest in the Portfolio Performance Unit and its data in the last quarter of this year than in the preceding four years that I’ve been at CGIAR. The System Council has said that “For the first time in CGIAR history, we can really understand what's going on and know what we're paying for”. There's a lot of recognition that we're on to something here, that we’re doing something right with the CGIAR Results Dashboard and the interface we built for users to interact with the results as well as with PPU’s Innovation Packages and Scaling Readiness work, including, notably, its pipeline—people love the innovation pipeline!’

PPU has recently had highly productive engagements with the African Development Bank’s ‘Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation’ (TAAT) flagship program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the CGIAR System Council (SO) and its Strategic Impact, Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (SIMEC), the Irish Government, the Linux Foundation, the UK Government, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) Innovation Commission, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the World Bank Group (more about the last below).

For more information, contact Jules Colomer, global head of PPU at j.colomer [at] cgiar.org, or Iddo Dror, leader of PPU’s workstream on Portfolio Practice Change, at I.dror [at] cgiar.org

IPSR—Tracking dollars to results

CGIAR’s Innovation Packages and Scaling Readiness (IPSR) team works with the CGIAR initiatives and platforms to produce Innovation Profiles introducing the innovations as well as to produce Innovation Packages that contextualize the innovations for scaling them in specific regions and circumstances. These Innovation Packages include lists of ‘enablers’—the various specific experts and conditions needed to ensure that a given innovation really goes to scale. Each of CGIAR’s many innovations is set within a package designed specifically for it. And those innovations are tracked. ‘For the first time’, says Iddo Dror, leader of PPU’s workstream on Portfolio Practice Change, ‘we now have the ability to track dollars in CGIAR innovations. This tells us not only what we’re doing, but also how much it’s costing, how many people it’s reaching, and what that reach is impacting. This is a milestone in our dollars-to-results journey.’

If last year was ‘the year of the Innovation Profile’, says Iddo, ‘this year is ‘the year of the Innovation Package’ (and next year will be ‘the year of the Innovation Strategy’.) The team leading development of the Innovation Packages, including Ewen Le Borgne, Edwin Kangethe and Mark Schut, have developed detailed training materials to guide CGIAR staff in implementing IPSR work. Being a small team, they are also training selected staff to be facilitators of Innovation Package Workshops, where the Innovation Packages get created. Fifty staff, representing 25 of the CGIAR’s 31 initiatives, were recently trained in IPSR facilitation in two ‘training of facilitator’ events, one in Kenya and the other in Mexico. Because feedback about the training was so positive, two more training events are being planned—one in Ethiopia in September and one in Thailand in November.

A key objective of IPSR is to build partnerships with external players. A World Bank project in Colombia is illustrative of the excitement PPU and IPSR are generating. Following a presentation made by PPU head Jules Colomer in Washington, DC, last April, World Bank staff—keen on the IPSR framework Jules presented—followed up with a proposal to fund a $260-million project with the Government of Colombia that will employ CGIAR to help design its Innovation Packages and Scaling Readiness methods, trainings and tools. ‘This is the first time,’ Iddo says, ‘that the World Bank—CGIAR’s longest and most consistent funder—has asked CGIAR to help it design a large-scale project. Mark Schut is leading this project with many other colleagues, the contract is almost signed, and PPU is mobilizing to execute the work.’

Back by popular demand, this October the IPSR team will again hold a ‘Scaling Convention’ of more than 100 scaling experts worldwide. And the IPSR team continues to engage with their existing key partners, such as the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the Ford Foundation, and USAID’s Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems.

For more information, contact Iddo at I.dror [at] cgiar.org or Edwin at e.kangethe [at] cgiar.org

CLAP—Consolidating country data

Finally, CGIAR’s Country-Level Aggregator Platform (CLAP) is now under way and looking good. Led by economist / data analyst Pedro Magalhaes, this platform, now in a ‘pre-alpha phase’, is already attracting high-level interest from people who have long dreamt of getting hold of rich country-level information as well as from several organizations interested in partnering with CGIAR to bring different datasets, under, and with, CLAP.

CLAP will soon undergo some preliminary tests towards a first, minimum viable, product. Some potential users are already involved in testing the usability of the platform. The goal is to allow users to seamlessly tap into very different sources of reliable and verifiable country-level information and put these pieces together to tell their own stories.

The challenge, says Pedro, is to build what’s known as a ‘semantic layer’. ‘Bringing all this information together might seem a simple task’, he explains, ‘but the vast amounts of CGIAR data assets tend to be siloed, with different knowledge sources using different terms for the same thing, or the same term for different things, and that can make the assembled knowledge unusable. At this stage, our challenges are not really technical in nature but rather about formulating the right questions—e.g. how do we define “country”?, or “partner”?, or “project”?.’ With answers to these questions agreed upon in back-and-forth conversations to arrive at consistent definitions, a semantic layer is built that offers a unified, consolidated and meaningful view of widely sourced data, making CLAP’s country-level aggregations highly useful for analysts and data-driven decision-makers and for deriving insights quickly and cost-effectively.

Those who might be interested to join this work on CLAP as testers can reach out to Pedro at p.magalhaes [at] cgiar.org or Fatma Attwa, data analyst, at f.attwa [at] cigar.org