Evaluation of IFAD's capacity as a promoter of replicable innovations - Extract of Agreement at Completion Point - IOE
Evaluation of IFAD's capacity as a promoter of replicable innovations - Extract of Agreement at Completion Point
Understanding at completion point1
Challenges. The extent to which IFAD can have a direct influence on innovation outside its own organizational boundaries and instruments is limited both by its small size and by its modus operandi. It can be an innovator with respect to its own organizational structure, its culture and the development of the instruments it uses to discharge its mandate. However, because of the very nature of these instruments and as the Fund is an IFI with no field presence, it can only promote innovation through partnerships.
Achievements: Despite these challenges the Fund has succeeded in promoting a number of innovative approaches that in some cases were replicated and upscaled. In particular, five notable cross cutting innovative approaches have been carefully assessed by the Evaluation. The evaluation found that the successful innovation approaches promoted by IFAD are those that are based on a somewhat structured and conscious innovation process with sequential stages, that build on the traditional knowledge of the poor in specific contexts, their culture and resource constraints, that are affordable by the poor and that produce fairly rapid results. Commitment, capacity and flexibility on the part of IFAD and its partners are crucial factors in such success.
IFAD's potential niche. The Fund has a potentially stronger niche in promoting replicable innovation for rural poverty alleviation. The evaluation concluded that IFAD's main innovation role should be viewed as a "facilitator" in scouting for, identifying and promoting pro-poor innovative approaches in cooperation with its partners. As such, the Fund together with its partners should continue to facilitate the promotion and dissemination of innovations for rural poverty reduction that are identified from various sources, including the poor themselves, and enable the rural poor to replicate them through their scaling up by larger partners and other IFAD projects. Partial testing of innovative approaches for performance improvement and validation can and should be supported by IFAD through its Technical Assistance Grant Programme.
The innovation agenda. While promotion of innovative approaches has been central to past IFAD's vision, the institution has no well-defined strategic agenda for innovations to guide and direct operations. That being the case, IFAD staff has diverse understandings of innovation and its process. The innovation process is neither well understood nor firmly integrated into operations. Innovations promoted by IFAD are not systematically recorded and assessed nor is there a coherent mechanism to generate and disseminate learning from these innovations.
The role of IFAD's instruments in innovations. IFAD has no specific instruments to promote innovations like other IFIs (e.g. the small innovation loans by the World Bank). It uses the instruments at its disposal to discharge its mandate for promoting innovations (e.g. loans, grants, M&E, partnership, policy dialogue, etc.). Each instrument has its own strengths and potential in this respect as well as weaknesses that need to be addressed. With no explicit strategic approach to innovation or adequate internalization of the innovation process, in the past IFAD projects have promoted innovations on a sporadic and case-by-case basis. Technical Assistant Grants play a role in identifying and testing innovations for adaptation and promotion by IFAD projects, but this role is yet to be fully developed. M&E has not so far effectively performed its risk-reduction and knowledge-generation role in view of weaknesses in project-based M&E. Partnership and policy dialogue have not been used to their full potential in promoting innovations. Nevertheless, positive results have been achieved in spite of constraints on identifying innovation during design, capacity limitations during implementation and, above all, lack of appropriate sequencing in the use of various instruments with respect to promoting innovations. This last aspect refers to the absence of coordinated and synchronized use of Technical Assistance Grants, Loans, partnership and policy dialogue in identifying, testing, promoting and upscaling of innovations. Overall, there is still large untapped potential for innovation using IFAD's existing instruments.
The special role of partnership. IFAD performs its innovation promotion role in a partnership context at all stages, but the limited capacity and willingness of partners is a handicap to implementing innovative approaches. So far, the Fund has not put sufficient emphasis on the identification of innovative and capable actors and institutions and the development of strategic alliances and partnerships to support the promotion and scaling up of innovations. No specific guidance is provided to the cooperating institutions in supervision to support and follow up innovative activities, particularly during the early stages of project implementation, nor is IFAD staff sufficiently involved in this area.
Organizational strengths for innovation. The Evaluation assessed IFAD's organizational capability to promote replicable innovations and constraints encountered at the institutional level.2 The main premise is that if, as an organization, IFAD is not innovative it will face difficulty to provide the enabling environment for its staff and partners to successfully promote field-level innovations. Overall, the evaluation concluded that IFAD staff are highly committed to the organization's mandate and to the search for innovative solutions. They believe in the essential role that IFAD can and should play in promoting replicable innovation for poverty reduction. The organization's further potential to promote innovative approaches has been confirmed through the positive views of NGOs and other field partners. The commitment of IFAD governing bodies and senior management to innovation (as illustrated by the request for this evaluation and the open and frank debate of its findings) is also an indicative strength for further enhancement of innovations. In addition, IFAD's diversified partnerships offer many valuable opportunities for strengthening the organization's role in innovation.
Organizational blockages. IFAD's staff interviewed during the evaluation and some of the IFAD Rome-based partners expressed some reservations concerning the capability of the organization to provide for its staff the enabling environment to strengthen their ability to promote innovative approaches. These reservations are inter alia: (i) the organization's culture does not explicitly demand, nurture or reward innovations, (ii) pressure for project approval prevents stronger emphasis on creativity and risk taking, (iii) human resource management policy does not stress innovation skills in recruitment, training and performance assessment, (iv) insufficient alignment between established processes for project design and implementation and the stages of the innovation process,3 and (v) a perceived distance during the interview period between management and staff reducing somewhat the proactive communication required for an appropriate pro-innovation corporate environment.
To sum up, IFAD can look back to a number of successful stories of innovation promotion and replication. But these success stories were achieved in spite of an overall unsystematic approach to promoting innovation, and an environment within the organization, which is not yet enabling as it should and could be. Clearly, IFAD has the potential to do more and better in this field, if the above mentioned issues were addressed.
On the basis of the aforementioned findings, the evaluation formulated a set of recommendations aimed at building on institutional strength and, at the same time, removing obstacles to innovation. The following is a summary of these recommendations and the related decision of IFAD Senior Management.
Create a common understanding of innovations for IFAD. Based on in-house discussion with the Core Learning Partnership and other staff members, the evaluation recommended the adoption of a specific definition of innovation to rally institutional understanding around it:
Decision by IFAD Senior Management:
"Innovation for IFAD is the development of improved and cost effective ways to address problems/opportunities faced by the rural poor through the projects and programmes it supports. These encompass institutional and technological approaches, as well as pro-poor policies and partnerships. IFAD directly supports innovation and, together with its partners, facilitates its processes and promotes its replication and scaling up."
Ascertain strategic commitment to innovations. Indeed, IFAD's Strategic Framework 2002-2006 calls for enhancing its catalytic impact by viewing projects as frameworks for fostering innovations (page 12). It also indicates that "IFAD's capacity to promote and encourage innovations" should be taken as one of the key areas for monitoring and evaluating the Fund's projects (page 15). The following step is to identify specific areas that reflect main innovation requirements in the medium-term and use them to direct operations. To operationalize this commitment, it is essential to develop a link between strategy and the allocation of resources for innovation. The link between strategy and resources can be made directly through increased allocations of funds to innovation within grants and loans, and indirectly, in a variety of functions and activities such as human resources management, strategic partnerships and systems for information and knowledge management on innovation.
Decision by IFAD Senior Management:
i.) The Strategic Framework (SF) recognizes that the pursuit and systematic promotion of replicable innovations is an important part of IFAD catalytic role. This must be taken into consideration in operationalising the SF.
ii.) In developing their Regional Strategies PMD and the various Regional Divisions are requested to identify specific key areas in their respective regions requiring the promotion of innovative solutions and these should be emphasized in COSOPs and the annual work programmes.
iii.) Resources will be allocated to these areas on a priority basis as per the strategic directions given by the 2003 IFAD budget.
Specify the stages of the innovation process and integrate them into current operations. The innovation process needs to be specified and better understood at the institutional level and integrated into IFAD's current operations. This would help sharpen the focus of operations on replicable innovations and on scaling up. The exact stages of the process should be flexible and adapted according to the specificity of each case. Based on IFAD practice the stages can be broadly defined as follows :
i) Recognize a need/opportunity for innovation;
ii) Scout for and select with potential users a promising innovative solution;
iii) Test (in order to check users' reactions) innovation performance and impact;
iv) Modify and improve as a result of test results;
v) Extract and share lessons learned from innovations;
vi) Promote (by ‘marketing' or dissemination) the innovation; and
vii) Facilitate for users to replicate/upscale innovations with support from various agencies.
The required integration, between the above-mentioned process and operations, would imply that IFAD agrees on a number of guiding principles for these stages to become part of the current framework of project development and approval.
Decision by IFAD Senior Management:
In future PMD and OE shall adopt the following guiding principles that are required for the integration of the stages of the innovation process into operations:
i) Emphasizing, scouting for and selecting innovation for promotion both at the early design stage and during implementation;
ii) Selecting design partners with innovation orientation and skills, and reviewing current procedures for identifying and engaging consultants and for mission composition in order to ensure entry and quality of innovations;
iii) Undertaking earlier and improved analysis of risks involved in and of the capacity of partners to implement both loan and grant projects;
iv) Focusing systematically on the testing of innovative approaches prior to promotion;
v) Directing project M&E (and supervision) to identify and monitoring innovative approaches;
vi) Including the replication and scaling up of innovations as part of the project cycle and ensuring the appropriate advance planning for this purpose.
vii) Emphasizing lessons learnt from innovation in independent evaluation and disseminate them appropriately.
Align organization processes and innovation promotion. As a first step to operationalize the above mentioned principles it is crucial to increase the alignment between organization processes on the one hand, and the stages of innovation and scaling up on the other. This requires reorienting current processes to meet the requirement of innovation promotion.
Decision by Senior Management:
In order to operationalize the above guiding principles PMD is requested to:
i) Prioritize innovation as one of the main criterion in the assessment of grant and loan proposals. This would include systematic reviews of innovative features by the Project Development Team, Technical Review Committee and PD portfolio reviews.
ii) Synchronize the use of IFAD instruments based on the requirements of the innovation process . This entails improved innovation focus of IFAD/NGO ECP grants and TA grants for agriculture research and training and strengthening their links with each other and with other instruments (e.g. partnership and policy dialogue) and with projects to form a more continuous innovation pipeline.
iii) Reconfigure partnerships to match the requirements of the innovation process (e.g. partnering with NGOs/CBOs in scouting for innovation and with governments, IFIs and other donors for replication and scaling up) and the development of effective models of partnership for scaling up innovations.
iv) Promote the scaling up of innovations into IFAD's core business through appropriate marketing skills to be built up through training and recruitment.
v) Strengthen learning from IFAD ongoing innovation experience, keeping a database of the innovations promoted and associated lessons, ensuring effective IT support systems, orienting project supervision and M&E towards assessment and follow up of innovative approaches, regular reporting and dissemination of innovation knowledge.
vi) Set up a small working group to investigate the feasibility of introducing new instruments to promote innovations.
Furthermore, Senior Management requests OE to:
vii) Emphasize evaluation of innovative features for learning in OE work programme and extracting and disseminating lessons learnt from innovation in future evaluation work.
Strengthen Staff/Managers capabilities and orienting IFAD's culture for promoting innovations. To build up its capabilities in promoting innovations IFAD's Human Resources management policy should systematically seek, develop, encourage and assess innovation specific skills. These skills relate to the identification, promotion and marketing of innovation. IFAD should recruit, train and reward its staff accordingly. IFAD should grow beyond being a project factory and become an institution that encourages creativity and risk-taking and manages innovation as an integral part of its operations. This implies that the ultimate aim of any project extends beyond ‘direct impact' to achieving replicability and scaling up successful innovative approaches. This requires concerted efforts and engagement by FH to assist IFAD achieving this aim. Commitment by SM and FH is required for the following recommendations.
Decision by Senior Management:
i) The human resource management policy in IFAD should be reoriented towards supporting innovation capabilities.
ii) Managers should empower staff to take initiatives, encourage and ‘sponsor' new ideas and ‘champions' and become more accessible to staff.
iii) Training in the above mentioned aspects (ii) to be offered for managers as well as staff.
In particular Human Resource Division (FH) is requested to:
iv) Develop an IFAD-specific innovation competency model that identifies the new knowledge and skills needed, in cooperation with relevant departments/divisions.
v) Once the model is developed and approved it should be the basis for formulating criteria to be used in recruiting, training and rewarding staff, as well as evaluating their performance.
Decision by Senior Management:
By the end of October PMD, FH and OE will submit to Senior Management an Action Plan for the implementation of the above-mentioned decisions, specifying measures to be taken, respective responsibilities and indicators of achievements.
1/ The Core Learning Partnership is composed of the Vice President, the Director of the Office of Evaluation and Studies, a Representative from PD Front Office, one Director from the Programme Management Department, two Representatives from PT, five Representatives from PMD Regional Divisions, the Focal Point of the Knowledge Management Coordinating Unit, Representative from the Resource Mobilization and Policy Department, the Coordinator of the NGO Unit in ED, the Senior Evaluation Officer in charge of the Evaluation.
2/ This assessment was undertaken jointly by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM) at the University of Brighton. The team undertook a structured assessment of perceived capabilities against an innovation capability reference model. In May 2001, an innovation capability questionnaire was completed by 40 IFAD staff (mostly from operations) covering the full spectrum of professional grades and directors. The reference period was the previous six months. The questionnaire (customized specifically for IFAD) reflects an innovation model based on existing innovation literature and extensive empirical research on the innovation capability of more than 100 organizations, including public service providers and non-profit institutions. The quantitative results of the questionnaire were analysed to identify drivers of and blockages to organizational innovation. Key issues from analysis of the completed questionnaires were identified and used in follow-up internal and external interviews and discussion group sessions.