ME&A Evaluating Feed The Future Seed Project Across Africa

ME&A is currently evaluating the $46.8 million Scaling Seeds & Technologies Partnership (SSTP) project for USAID Feed The Future (FTF). The SSTP project was initiated by the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in July 2013 with funding from USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). The Partnership seeks to accelerate smallholder farmer access to transformative agricultural technologies. It helps governments strengthen their seed sectors and promote the commercialization, distribution and adoption of improved seeds and other key technologies. This innovative project forms one of several enabling actions of the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, which is currently being implemented in six of the ten countries that form part of the New Alliance.

An ME&A team is collecting data in three countries, Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania, through multiple key informant interviews with USAID, AGRA/SSTP staff, sub-grantees and other partners, focus group discussions with female and male farmers, an online survey across 60 sub-grantees, and a quantitative survey across 1,500-2,500 direct and indirect beneficiaries.

The ultimate aim of this performance evaluation is to improve the effectiveness of SSTP so that it might better meet its objectives. The evaluation’s findings and recommendations will feed into SSTP’s future Implementation Plans. It is also expected that the evaluation will provide robust empirical evidence in response to the evaluation questions to generate learning about scaling seeds and technology adoption through the partnership approach being implemented by the SSTP project.

ME&A is conducting this performance evaluation for USAID under the Feed The Future Global Program Evaluation for Effectiveness and Learning (PEEL) contract awarded to ME&A in 2016.