Involving businesses in market facilitation M&E

Let me be completely honest. I’ve been quite skeptical of the effectiveness of the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) systems on the big value chains project I’m currently working on. My main observations involved an M&E officer at a field office screaming at field staff to fill in forms, go interview smallholder farmers and “reach our target numbers for this quarter”! It doesn’t match well with my vision of flexible and dynamic field staff responding to market changes and opportunities to build stronger business linkages in the sector. So I was pretty amazed and impressed to see an example where an initiative driven by M&E turned into an innovative lever for business behavior change last week!

The project has obligations to use handheld GPS devices to map a certain number of farmer fields to hit the prescribed targets in the project proposal, and in particular there is a mammoth effort over the next month to map the field size and locations for 6,000+ smallholder farmers whom the project is interacting with.

Initial pitch from M&E: Field staff would have to take almost half of their time for the month (which is a critical month for agriculture) to take the data collectors to various communities where farmers are located and introduce them to the group chairmen to be able to do the mapping. This fit my mental model of current M&E well -> a huge amount of field staff time wasted doing brute force data collection to meet donor requirements.

The Tweak: A strong and forward thinking manager used her influence to shift the methodology for the data collection: Instead of getting field staff to drive the process, the project would connect the data collectors with the nucleus farmers who are working directly with all the smaller farmers. The nucleus farmers and their field officers would then be directly involved in targeting and executing the field work.

NOTE: a nucleus farmer is a more commercial farmer who has capital, equipment and technical knowledge to offer to a larger number of small farmers (called outgrowers), often on credit. The outgrowers will pay back an agreed amount of their crops directly at harvest time to pay back the services/inputs.

Implications: This way the nucleus farmers can gain experience with collecting and managing information on the outgrowers they are managing, and it opens the door for the project to coach them through analyzing and making business decisions based on the performance of various farmer groups! After a quick pitch, 3 major nucleus farmers (together serving close to 4000 small outgrowers) jumped on board and committed to support the data collection process. They acknowledged the lack of information they have on their farmers, and expressed interest in understanding in more depth what’s really happening in their supply chain.

Beyond the business impact, the tweak in approach starts to change the signals/incentives for field staff: It demonstrates that their job ISN’T data collection. It also makes it much easier for them to target and implement changes in records keeping + analysis and outgrower management with the nucleus farmers.