Thank you Shehzaad for posing such an interesting and stimulating question regarding "Attribution" issue in ICT in Agriculture initiatives

From my limited experience of implementing ICT intervention in the field of agriculture, I found attribution issue to be a bit complicated. To be even more precise, we are yet find a widely acceptable solution for this issue of attribution for the ICT interventions in agriculture.

From our experience of dealing with attribution issue, we came across below mentioned problems:

In most of the cases ICT interventions thrives for facilitating easier access to information (pertaining disease prevention, cultivation technique, fertilizer dose so on and so forth) for the farmers, And it is assumed that by accessing the information the farmers will be able to benefit. In reality, we have come across instances where a farmer got the required solution but could not benefit just because the recommended insecticide/pesticide by the Agri-help line was not available at that specific location. So, it is apparent that JUST providing with the information does not ensure benefit for the farmer. There is this other factor of “availability of recommended solution”. And there could be plenty of other factors that might have contributed to the crop saving or increased income for the farmers (ranging from good monsoon rain to government’s subsidy for irrigation and what not). Hence, isolating the true attribution of the “information” is very difficult to measure. Apart from that, even if you are able to list down all the factores for increased income/productivity for farmers, how do you distribute the attribution among all the factors and on what basis?

I am eagerly waiting to know how other projects are dealing with these issues!

Hi Shehzaad,

Thanks for further stimulating this discussion. Please find my response as below:

From the remarks of different forum participants of this on line conference, it is apparent that most of the development projects are following an impact measurement methodology that enables them to report the impact of a program or its activities designed beforehand. And following that kind of methodology does not allow the program team to reevaluate and bring in changes in program activities. In contrary to that, our program uses impact chain for each of the activities/intervention following logical consequences of the activities. Thus that enables us to tract whether the planned activities are resulting in intended outcome. If the planned activities are giving the program with an anticipated results well and good. But if the planned activities are not yielding anticipated results, then we redesign the planned activities based on the feedback from the intended beneficiary and/or market system. Thus we thrive for more result oriented activities for our intended beneficiaries following a non-linear process.

I believe flexibility is a key feature of our methodology and we also believe there is no alternate to this. We use impact chains for keeping a track on the changes facilitated in market system/dynamics and if things are not happening as expected, we take the liberty to bring in changes in the activity plan. And usually these kind of decisions are made based on system generated data. Where we primarily look at the impact scenario at the beneficiary level from the system generated data. Here, it is necessary to mention that for ICT interventions system generated data is quite readily available. For an example, our Agri help line project with Banglalink, we get monthly reports of service usage/service usage growth/service user retention and etc. And all these reports are generated from the CRM that is being used in the call center for the agri help line.

However, we are keen to improve our MRM system and looking forward learn about other good practices in monitoring and evaluation of ICT projects.

Cheers!

Hello everyone! Just thought of sharing our/Katalyst experience of dealing with impact measurement for our ICT initiatives.

As discussed by Jim Tanburn, We are also using results chain for monitoring and capturing the impact for our Tele Center and Mobile Telephony based initiatives. And these kind of results chain also enable us to keep atrack of the out come of our activities on a continuous basis. We are not just doing a post assessment after the implementation work is done. Rather it is utilized as "True" monitoring tool for assessing the progress and impact of our activities. It also allow us to bring in changes at activity level based on the feedback we receive at different levels of the market system and end beneficiery.

In addition to that, I must say using impact chain for monitoring ICT4D initiatives is even more convenient and usefull becasue of the different "system generated" data for the usage of different ICT based solutions or services.

For an example: Our Agri help line project (Jigyasha 7676) with one of the largest Telecom operator in Bangladesh is generating good amount of usage data from the CRM that is being used in the call centre. It does not require us any extra cost for monitoring the impact at usage level. It also enabled us to design effective promotional campaigns, addition of new content and etc just by using these kind of system generated data.

Now, I would also like to know how other projects are dealing with this issue of impact measurement. Please share your experiences and thoughts!

Cheers!