Diagnostics, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning: Assessing systems, enabling solutions

FAO develops tools to diagnose Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) and track their performance, helping countries generate evidence and guide innovation. A key resource is the Indicator Framework for the Assessment of National AIS. This flexible framework uses 36 indicators to measure both innovation system properties (e.g. enabling factors, interactions, innovation intensity) and results (e.g. knowledge generation, adoption, outcomes). It can be adapted to diverse country contexts and themes such as environment, human capital, infrastructure and digitalization, and also inspired the Innovation Country Profile tool available on the TAPipedia portal.

Through the two EU-funded projects that supported the Tropical Agriculture Platform, CDAIS and TAP-AIS, a participatory Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning system to serve multistakeholder innovation approaches was developed and tested at country level. The principles and tools of this system have been adopted in the current Innovation Policy Labs methodology. By applying such diagnostic and MEL frameworks, FAO enables the creation of feedback loops that strengthen AIS, foster adaptation, and scale transformative impact.