IFAD striving to increasingly define beneficiary target group - IOE
Rome, 4 February 2022 – “We found, in 2018, that there was a lack of agreement within IFAD on the Fund’s target group and the strategies needed to reach them,” reported Dr Chitra Deshpande, Senior Evaluation Officer of the Independent Office of Evaluation of IFAD (IOE), during an on-line seminar on 4 February 2022.
Organized and hosted by IOE, the seminar brought together over ninety IFAD staff, including from the Gender & Social Inclusion team from the Environment, Climate, Gender and Social Inclusion division (ECG), as well as from different divisions at country, regional and headquarters levels.
Enriching discussions took place on targeting performance, methods and issues, during the event. Participants also had the opportunity to reflect upon and discuss the findings and conclusions of the literature review on ‘Targeting of the Poor and Ultra-Poor’ carried out by Professor Tauhidur Rahman, associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Department of Economics at the University of Arizona.
“The traditional approach used to be conducting extensive household surveys, and based on that you determined who was poor. However, this approach in addition to being expensive has a lot of measurement errors. In response to these limitations, there are five alternative methods that can be found in the literature. These are proxy means testing, geographic targeting, demographic targeting, self-targeting, and community-based targeting”, Professor Rahman noted during his presentation. Advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches were discussed.
Dr Deshpande moderated the seminar, which also featured opening remarks by Dr Indran A. Naidoo, Director of IOE, an overview of the review of the IFAD targeting policy by Ndaya Beltchika, Lead Technical Specialist on Gender and Social Inclusion in ECG, and closing remarks by Fabrizio Felloni, Deputy Director of IOE.
During her intervention, Ms. Beltchika explained that within IFAD there is a strong commitment to focus the Fund’s target group on the poorest of the poor, including indigenous peoples and people with disabilities.
Feedback gathered during the discussions will provide substantive inputs into the Evaluation Synthesis Note (ESN) on targeting, which IOE is conducting in 2022 to contribute to the updated IFAD targeting policy that will be presented to the Executive Board in December 2022. The ESN is a new IOE product. Dr Naidoo explained that the goal of the ESN is to learn from experience and practice based on evidence from independent evaluation, through a rapid assessment, with a view to providing timely and useful input for decision-making in IFAD.
For further information, please visit the seminar event page [here], or contact Alexander Voccia at [email protected]