OC-4.1: Number of farm households that have adopted improved crop varieities and management practices

Owned by Enrico Bonaiuti
May 05, 2020
2 min read

Definition: This indicator measures the number of households that allocate part of their farm land to one or more improved varieties of ICARDA-promoted crop varieties and/or crop management practices promoted by ICARDA.
Participants in technology demonstrations as part of a group should not be counted under this indicator.
The households can immediately be deemed to have adopted if they grow the by paying a monetary or material cost to access the seed/planting material.
If the seed/planting material are handed to the farm household without a requirement to pay a monetary or material cost, upon receipt or at a later time, then the farm household can only be deemed to have adopted the subsequently grow the improved variety.

Unit of Measure: Count

Disaggregated by: Gender of the household head/farm plot, Crop, Geographic location (National, sub-national), Variety identification method (DNA fingerprinting, expert opinion, visual aid protocols, self-reported)

Method of Calculation: Summation of the count of households

Data sources: Project reports, farm households, seed retailers, seed companies

Data collection method: Document review, farm household surveys, agro-input market surveys, interviews with seed company staff

Data collection and reporting responsibility: Program leaders, project leaders, country managers, project M&E focal points

Data Collection and Reporting Frequency: Annual, bi-annual, baseline, mid-term, end-term

Evidence required:
For internal evaluation or research studies: Study protocol, data collection tools, dataset, report;
For external evaluation or research studies: Request for proposals (RFP) document, inception report, final report, dataset

Rationale: Adoption is a necessary condition to achieving impact. This metric will serve as an early warning to ICARDA scientists as to whaether the research and development outputs will lead to the scale of impact envisioned.

Comments and limitations: The variety identification approaches are quite varied and some of the methods may leave room for misclassification of varieties as improved whereas not. However, given the costs and challenges involved with the deployment of more rigorous methods, it is prudent that a wide scope of methods, that may be affordable and provide results of acceptable quality be recommended as well. The disparity in approaches will then be managed through a disaggregation, and as such depending on the level of rigor the end-user of the information requires, then the data can be retrieved and disaggregated accordingly.