- Agriculture
- Climate change
- Environment
- Evaluation event
- Evaluation methods
- Evaluation process
- Evaluation results
- Food Security
- Gender
- Humanitarian
- Impact evaluation
- Monitoring & Evaluation
- Poverty
- Results based management
- Rural development
- SDGs
First published here
“We need to be more creative in terms of mobilizing resources to ensure that evaluation can be attentive to both the human and environmental elements. We should use broad-based networking for climate and natural resources management financing. This means going beyond public agencies that already cooperate, including by drawing in the private sector, civil society, public development banks”, said Paolo Silveri, Chief of Section at the Independent Evaluation Office of IFAD (IOE), during a panel discussion titled ‘Sustainability-inclusive evaluations in agriculture: Exploring opportunities for collaboration’.
Organized by EvalforEarth, the session brought together leading evaluation experts from CGIAR, WFP, GEF, IFAD, FAO and Footprint Evaluation, to explore how co-created sustainability-inclusive frameworks and tools can support evaluation practice in agriculture, ensuring meaningful contributions to both people and planet. Discussions focused on how EvalforEarth’s participating global agencies (CGIAR, WFP, GEF, IFAD and FAO), in collaboration with Footprint Evaluation, could benefit from co-creating sustainability-inclusive frameworks and tools that could be used to evaluate their contributions to overlapping intended outcomes, ending hunger and promoting sustainable agriculture.
During the event, panellists investigated actionable strategies to ensure evaluations systematically assess agriculture’s contributions to people and planet. To this end, they identified specific frameworks and tools that would be most useful, and ideas for how these might be collaboratively funded and developed in ways that foster cross-organizational capacity development and scalable impact.
Mr Silveri noted that climate change and sustainability of natural resources management have been part and parcel of global development efforts of IFAD for a long time. Adaptation to climate change and rehabilitation of natural resources in very harsh environments have been at the centre of what the Fund does since many years. More recently, however, IFAD has been systematically intervening on both social and climate-environmental elements of agriculture and food systems’ transformation. Also, social inclusion, on one hand, and environmental rehabilitation, on the other, have been looked at as integrated systems. The attention to fragile situations, which brings IFAD closer to WFP in its operations in many cases, and collaboration with the private section, have also been more recently integrated into the spectrum of IFAD’s traditional lines of action that focus on poverty reduction in remote areas. In this context, the Food Systems Summit, and the decisions that were made following a major, worldwide consultation process, trigger the need to transform food systems in an environmentally sustainable way and healthy for people. These are being translated into action plans at the national level.
EvalforEarth is a dynamic Community of Practice dedicated to advancing evaluation in Food Security, Environment, Agriculture and Rural Development. gLOCAL Evaluation Week is a unique knowledge-sharing event, connecting a global community of people across sectors and regions. Over the course of a week, participants from all over the world join events - in their neighbourhood or across the ocean - to learn from each other on a vast number of topics and themes. Since 2019, the gLOCAL platform has hosted thousands of events in multiple languages across six continents. It has grown to become one of the largest M&E knowledge-sharing events in the world.