Logframes necessarily rest on assumptions about what will transpire in the external environment surrounding the enterprise. The CGIAR logframe, and those of the centres and projects, are based on a group of hypotheses about how the work of the centres or their projects is connected to the goals of the CGIAR. Commonly, such hypotheses are examined or assessed for their validity, i.e. for their conformance with facts.
The crucial hypotheses connecting work with goals in the case of the CGIAR are presented in Section 4.2 - Indicators for CGIAR Goals. Briefly, they start with the claim that research on technology and policy is an important source of productivity increases, that increased productivities are crucial to increased real incomes, that through direct and indirect routes increased real incomes lead to higher national incomes, and that, with high probability, higher national incomes result in a reduction of poverty. These connections, or lines of cause and effect, rest on tightly integrated theoretical and empirical results and, except for the last step, are part of the conventional wisdom in the development community. The last step, that of connecting national income to poverty reduction, has been strongly supported by recent empirical work undertaken by the World Bank. (See Chapter 3 of CGIAR Priorities and Strategies for Resource Allocation During 1998-2000, TAC Secretariat, May 1997, for further comment and a partial bibliography.)
In time, TAC will further review these and other hypotheses related to poverty, in particular as a part of its work on the next round of priority setting for the CGIAR.
