Tackling rural poverty, together

Nwanze Okidegbe, Ph.D.

Senior Advisor – Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank (WB), Washington

Nater: What’s wrong with current data quality?

Okidegbe: As I said, an indicator is only as good as its underlying data. Many developing countries spend significant financial and human resources to collect data that are not always reliable or measurable, and that, in some cases, they may never use. In fact, there’s emerging consensus in many partner-countries that they have to change course and improve their data collection, analysis, interpretation and use. The Platform wants to help streamline and demystify the process. We’re defining an approach for selecting a core set of indicators in agriculture and rural development that most development partners would endorse and that partner-countries’ national systems can produce, adapt and use.

The indicators must work at both the project level, and, when aggregated, they should be able to tell a story at country and global levels, as well. They’ll have to be measurable, feasible and appropriate to country context, and that means involving partner-countries in validating the data. That’s why we’re field-testing them in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Senegal and Nigeria, to enhance partner-countries’ commitment and ownership, and getting them peer-reviewed by experts. We aim also to have an advanced draft reviewed and critiqued during the Fourth International Conference on Agricultural Statistics (ICAS IV) in Beijing this coming October.

How have you structured the research?
We’re working with experts from partner-countries, from the Platform’s member organisations, especially OECD/DAC, the European Commission, and the FAO and focusing, to start with, only on agriculture. First, we carried out an extensive literature review of indicators and documented how indicators have been developed and used under unfavourable conditions. We then identified a core set of indicators that should be collected in each of the sub-sectors of agriculture, including how they should be collected and by whom. We grouped the core indicators into three categories, from project component outputs through project development outcomes to final country outcomes. The set of indicators was subjected to rigorous review by experts and revised accordingly.

What will the finished product look like? Who’s it for and how will it help?
It’ll be a M&E toolkit. We aim to publish it by the end of 2007, and disseminate it widely. It will be periodically updated, both electronically and in print. Of course, we recognise that for the tools to work, they can’t be too complicated or too costly, or partner-countries won’t use them. The toolkit should help practitioners in the field select and use core M&E indicators for their projects and programmes. It should also be of use to policymakers and others working at the country level to assess how their programmes and strategies are contributing towards agricultural growth and rural poverty reduction.

The benefits should include better policy monitoring and refinement, more efficient investment in projects and programmes and more efficient, functioning markets. And overall, the toolkit should provide us with a better set of markers on progress towards achieving the MDGs in rural areas of partner-countries.

Changing customary practice is hard. Do you expect resistance?
Obviously, practitioners who are used to certain ways of doing things are not likely to accept new concepts without lots of questions. Such reactions are healthy. We recognise that there has to be buy-in before the core indicators are widely accepted and systematically used. Our task is to come up with the best-possible product and demonstrate to potential skeptics that the new approach both adds value and is cost-effective. This is why the in-country validation exercise is essential because it will help ensure the proposed core indicators are useful and relevant at the field level.

This Platform initiative is an opportunity for donors and partner-countries to come together over a single set of indicators for agriculture and show that we’re serious about both harmonisation and measuring results. It’s an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.

Interview conducted and edited by Timothy Nater.
Photos: Timothy Nater

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