Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR)

In this dataset, we compile current project data from three major international financial institutions (or IFIs) - the World Bank, African Development Bank, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development - to understand

1. how much countries are borrowing from each institution. and
2. how much of that funding is devoted to small scale producer agriculture.

We begin by gathering publicly accessible data through downloads and webscraping Python and R scripts. These data are then imported into the statistical software program, Stata, for cleaning and export to Excel for analysis. This dataset contains rich information about current projects (active, in implementation, or recently approved), such as project title, project description, borrowing ministry, commitment amount, and sector. We then code relevant projects into two categories: On Farm (projects pertaining directly to small scale producer agriculture) and Rural/Agricultural Economies (inclusive of On Farm, but broader to include projects that impact community livelihoods and wellbeing). Finally, we annualize and aggregate these coded projects by IFI and then by country for analysis. Bilateral funding, government expenditures on agriculture, and development indicators are also included as supporting data to add context to a country's progress towards agricultural transformation.

The primary utility of this dataset is having all projects collected in a single spreadsheet where it is possible to search by key terms (e.g. commodity, market, financial, value chain) for lending by IFI and country, and to get some level of project detail.  We have categorized projects by lending category (e.g. irrigation, livestock, agricultural development, research/extention/training) to aggregate across IFI so that the total funding for any country is easier to find. For example, Ethiopia and Nigeria receive the most total lending from these IFIs (though not on a per capita basis), with each country receiving more than $3 billion per year on average. Ethiopia receives the most lending devoted to On Farm projects, roughly $585 million per year.  Overall, these data provide a snapshot of the magnitude and direction of these IFI's lending over the past several years to sub-Saharan Africa. 

Suggested Citation: 

Figone, K., Porton, A., Kiel, S., Hariri, B., Kaminsky, M., Alia, D., Anderson, C.L., and Trindade, F. (2021). Summary of Three International Financial Institution (IFI) Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa. EPAR Technical Report #411. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington. Retrieved <Day Month Year> from https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research/tracking-investment-landscape-summary-three-international-financial-institutions-ifis

This report reviews and summarizes the existing evidence on the impact of access to financial services/products on measures of production, income and wealth, consumption and food security, and resilience for smallholder farmers  and other rural customers and their households in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study covers four main types of financial products/services: 1) credit; 2) savings; 3) insurance; 4) transactional products. We also review the very limited evidence on the effectiveness of bundling these products/services together and of combining them with other offerings such as trainings or support for access to markets, and of providing them via digital channels. We note when financial products/services have been specifically designed to serve the needs of rural customers or smallholder farmers, since the needs of these groups are often very different from those of other stakeholders.

This report reviews approaches to results measurement used by multilateral and bilateral donor organizations and highlights trends and gaps in how donors measure and report on their performance. Our review consists of assessing donor organizations in terms of their institutional design and levels of evaluation for results measurement, their organizational processes for measuring types of results including coordination and alignment with recipients, outputs and implementation, outcomes and impacts, and costs and effectiveness, and their processes for reporting and using results information. We collect evidence on 12 bilateral organizations and 10 multilateral organizations. The evidence review includes multi-country reviews of aid effectiveness, peer reviews by other donor organizations, donor evaluation plans and frameworks, and donor results and reporting documents. The report is based on an accompanying spreadsheet that contains the coded information from the 22 donor organizations. We find that donors report several types of results, but that there are challenges to measuring certain results at the aggregate donor level, due to challenges with funding and coordination for results measurement at the project, country, portfolio, and donor levels. Approaches to results measurement vary across donor organizations. We identify some trends and differences among groups of donors, notably between bilateral and multilateral donors, but overall there are no clear delineations in how donors approach results measurement. 

Aid results information is often not comparable, since monitoring and evaluation frameworks, information gathering processes, and definitions of “results” differ across donors and governments. This report reviews approaches to results monitoring and evaluation used by governments in developing countries, and highlights trends and gaps in national monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. We collect evidence on 42 separate government M&E systems in 23 developing countries, including 17 general national M&E systems and 25 sector-specific national M&E systems, with 14 focused on HIV/AIDS, 8 on health, and 3 on agriculture. The evidence review includes external case studies and evaluations of M&E systems, government M&E assessments, M&E plans, strategic plans with an M&E component, and multi-country reviews of M&E, accountability, and aid effectiveness. We evaluate harmonization of government and development partner M&E systems, coordination and institutionalization of government M&E, challenges in data collection and monitoring, and analysis and use of results information. We also report on key characteristics of M&E systems in different sectors.