All-In Research

Feed the Future Advancing Local Leadership, Innovation and Networks (ALL-IN)

On May 12, 2020, at the University of California (UC) Davis, Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience (MRR Innovation Lab) announced the award of a five-year research grant to the International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED) to lead the implementation of MRR Innovation Lab’s Advancing Local Leadership, Innovation and Networks (ALL IN) in Africa.

ALL IN is a new research program that aims to advance host country leadership in defining and implementing research projects and to deepen host country connections. The research will develop and test financial and market innovations that take the most promising agricultural tools for families in developing economies from the lab to the field.

ALL IN is designed to address capacity gaps among many research institutions in managing large and complex awards (particularly the unique complexities of managing the United States Agency for International Development awards). The program builds on the successes and draws on the strength of US-African research collaborations, but inverts the traditional model. ALL IN will call for researchers at African institutions to take the lead in defining priorities and will work with US university research partners to supplement their own skills, talents, and ideas.

Over the years, Feed the Future Innovation Labs has been built on partnerships between researchers at U.S. universities and researchers at host-country universities and institutions. Historically, these partnerships have been led, in both program administration and the ideas that drive the research, from the U.S. ALL IN will seek to shift this leadership role to researchers in Africa.

ICED Capacity to serve as Regional Hub for ALL-IN

ICED was established in 2016 to nurture leadership and innovation in impact evaluation for development by mobilizing the emergent capacity of African universities and research institutions. ICED is positioned to bridge the gap that can exist between the capacity of an innovative researcher to conduct high-quality research and the capacity of that researcher’s institution to manage a large and complex research project, allowing us to award significant funding to innovative host-country based researchers to lead a research project.

ICED currently have a memorandum of understandings (MOU) with research institutions in Africa such as the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research in the University of Ghana; the School of Graduate Studies, Research & Extension of the United States International University (USIU-Africa) in Nairobi, Kenya; The University of Nairobi Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation, Kenya, Nairobi; The School of Agricultural Economics and Business Studies, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania; Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and The Ethiopian Economic Policy Research Institute, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. ICED has plans to widen the network to most of the research institutions in Africa.

ICED has also developed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with selected Africa country government ministries to promote research and evaluation for policy-making and action. ICED currently has MOU with the Ghana Government Ministry of Monitoring and Evaluation, The commissioner of M&E, office of the Prime Minister, Uganda, The State Ministry of Planning, Department of M&E, Kenya National Treasury and Planning, The Planning Commission, Malawi, and The Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation, Puntland, State of Somalia.

ICED has been championing the evidence to action movement in Africa through its annual Evidence to Action conference (E2A) which has created an excellent platform for researchers, academics, private sector practitioners, development agencies, civil society and policy makers to learn, share information, build networks and partnerships with the overall objective of identifying effective strategies and interventions for ensuring data generated from research and evaluation projects is well utilized.

Therefore, as an African-based and African-led research institution, ICED is a natural choice to lead ALL IN based on its experience in nurturing leadership and innovation in impact evaluation for development and its ability to mobilize the emergent capacity of African universities and research institutions

ICED hopes that this research initiative and the innovations and interventions that emerge, will in turn boost the capacity of various African governments to design sound evidence-based policies that will cause positive development outcomes in the continent.

Project Team Members

In 2013, Ghana was the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to attain the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty. However, poverty continues to be pervasive in Ghana’s rural areas. Further, Ghana has significant regional differences in poverty, with the northern, upper east and upper west regions reporting poverty rates exceeding half of the population.

This persistent rural poverty has had dire consequences for families’ nutrition. In 2019, about one in five children under five years of age in Ghana were stunted, and one in ten were underweight. In Ghana’s northern region, the prevalence of stunting in 2017 was 33 percent, almost twice the national average. This high burden of malnutrition affects children’s education outcomes, cognitive development as well as physical growth.

The USAID Resiliency in Northern Ghana (RING) project is an integrated project under the Feed the Future initiative that seeks to improve the livelihoods and nutritional status of vulnerable rural families. RING-I, implemented from 2012 to 2019, was designed to increase the consumption of diverse quality foods, improve nutrition and hygiene among women and young children and strengthen local networks for vulnerable households. RING-II, currently underway, promotes families’ wellbeing and resilience through improved farming practices.

Direct mobile phone communication through an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform may help to expand the impacts of the RING project by seeking to improve poor and vulnerable families’ nutrition. While communication on its own will not improve nutrition and reduce poverty, understanding its contributions to these broader efforts can improve its impact in ongoing and future programming.

Research Design

This ALL-IN research project, led by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) at the University of Ghana, Legon, evaluates the impacts of the RING project on household nutrition and resilience to shocks in Northern Ghana. The evaluation includes a careful examination of whether communication (i.e. IVR messaging) can encourage and reinforce this kind of nutrition-based intervention. The research team is also exploring whether messages sent to men and women separately or together has a larger impact on household decisions related to nutrition.

The research team is employing a multi-stage sampling procedure where participants are selected from 15 districts, and within each district a random selection of 180 communities. Participants are households with children under two years old. The majority of these households are smallholder farmers who cultivate maize, soybean, groundnut, cowpea and leafy vegetables. The total number of participants is estimated to be about 1,800 households.

The team is working with Ghana-based IT firm Image-AD to send out nutrition-based messages by mobile phone to randomly selected households in the treatment groups. The nutrition-based messages to be used are key messages derived from the nutrition-based programs undertaken as part of USAID programming in the project area. Testing differences in outcomes between participating households and their non-participating counterparts will indicate whether these messages improve nutrition-related decisions and behaviors, and resilience to shocks like drought.

The study is measuring the intervention’s impacts on household income, household expenditures on water, sanitation and hygiene, spending on food, and dietary diversity as well as children’s nutrition-related outcomes such as weight and height and incidence of illness.

Development Impact

The USAID Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) has an overall goal of supporting Ghana to increase self-reliance with all citizens living a healthy and productive life. Current inequalities biased against Northern Ghana require a systematic approach that takes these inequalities into account. This is particularly important as the adverse effects of the COVID-19 shock is likely to linger on and exacerbate spatial inequality.

If the RING program improves households’ welfare, it could lay the foundation for planning the country’s development agenda with poverty and inequality at the heart of such a plan. This ALL-IN project includes an evaluation of the cost effectiveness of using a mobile phone platform to speed up behavior change. Fortunately for Ghana, mobile phone penetration is very high. This makes the use of mobile phones for communicating to smallholder farmers as a means to improve families’ nutrition and reduce poverty a real possibility.

UNDP
Ghana Statistical Service (GSS)
UNICEF
USAID
Osei, R. D. et al. 2021. “Effects of Long-Term Malnutrition on Education Outcomes in Ghana: Evidence from a Panel Study.” The European Journal of Development Research.

This report is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) cooperative agreement 7200AA19LE00004. The contents are the responsibility of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.