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ABSTRACT

Research is a developmental and economic activity, especially agricultural research where many resources are involved. The assessment of research investment helps in tracing the actions, making decisions and taking corrective actions in the allocation of resources; and here lies the concept of output, outcome and impact of research. In India, broadly, impact assessment in agricultural research is used for assessing the socio-economic effects of an extension, technology or communication intervention. Impact assessment measures the achievement of project milestones, outputs, outcomes, and impact on the targeted population. In agricultural research impact assessment remains always a critical part, without which the whole research cycle is incomplete.

Keywords: Agricultural Research, Technology, impact assessment

 

Agricultural research seems to be economic where many resources are concerned including natural and monetary resources. Similar to different investment plan, resource allocation to agricultural research needs to be practical and justified. Keeping societal challenges and sustainable development as an agenda, questions are reinforced about the role of research on economic growth, livelihood improvement and societal wellbeing. The objectives as standard of assessment of research investment helps in making decision and taking corrective actions in allocation of resources; and here begins the concept of output, outcome and impact of research.  Assessing the impact of any intervention on the user group is a critical part for assessing the utility of technological or economical interventions. According to World Bank, Impact assessment is intended to determine more desired effects (both positive and negative) on individuals, households, and institutions, and whether those effects are attributable to the program intervention (Baker, 2000).  In India, National Agricultural Research and Education System (NARES) follows impact assessment for assessing the socio-economic effects of an extension, technology or communication intervention. It uses actually for developing research and developing priorities and improving the accountability for resources and efforts invested in the intervention. Systematic impact assessment not only bothers effect, even it focuses on to know which research areas or themes and programs benefit the poor and regions.  In general, impact assessment means not always the positive impact; rather it deals with positive and negative, direct and indirect effects. The word ‘impact’ is well understood in everyday life, but however, when used from development perspective, it leaves practitioners deep understanding and mining the situation in details.

 

Explain the Changes at different levels; Understanding the Impact

Understanding the impact is very crucial before the planning of the assessment. What does impact mean in relation to development arena? In fact what concepts it includes. In impact main concern is likely to be change either intentionally or unintentionally, direct or indirect.  Even the impact might be of short term as well as long term. The impact assessment entails the understanding the nature of change that has taken place because of any particular intervention, program or technology in agricultural context. In assessing the impact, organizations normally addresses the questions like; what change has taken place? For whom? How far it was significant? Will it last? In what ways our intervention has contributed to the changes? In order to achieve desired long-term changes, there may be many steps between the activities and the desired impact. Impact assessment (IA) measures the achievement of project milestones, outputs, outcomes and impact on the targeted population. IA framework attempts to categories the steps by breaking them down into manageable stages – inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impact.

In this chain all the inputs are used in order to carry out and complete the activities and then activities lead to services delivered (outputs). The outputs lead to bring about change i.e. outcomes and eventually in return it will contribute to the impact. A simplified way of describing these different terms are how related; which work as a rule of thumb for the practitioners.

However, in theory, these different concepts are easy to differentiate, but in practice, it’s a challenge to clearly differentiate and identify the same. Because sometimes the areas overlaps each other and which creates confusion. There is no real solution to this difficulty, for that one can set up very clear-cut definitions and guidelines. So, the favored way out is to desire for less complicated and simply defining the outputs as the services delivered that largely under the control of any agency, outcome as a its short or medium term effects and impact as the lasting or significant changes made out of intervention/technology/ program etc. by any organization.

 Impact Assessment; Interplay of Indicators:

The Indicators are common means to assess the impact of the technology/program/ any intervention, especially in agricultural context. Indicators need to be defining during the beginning stage, often need to be specified and define properly. Impact indicators vary with technology and level of assessment.

What should we measure?

·   Technical aspects of the technology

·   Socio-economic aspect of the technology

·   Socio-cultural aspect of the technology

·   Commercial aspect

·   Environmental aspect

Joshi, 2003 talked about some impact indicators and he divided into two different levels such as a) farm level impact indicators and b) regional/ national level impact indicators.

Approaches followed for Impact Assessment:

i.   Quantitative impact assessment approaches

 

·   Based on time period of assessment

a. Ex-ante assessment: assessment may take place before approval of an intervention, and it forecast potential impacts as part of the planning, design and approval of the intervention.

 

b.  Ex post assessment: identifies the actual impacts after the implementation which enables corrective actions to be taken if necessary.

 

·   Based on research design:

a. Experimental approaches:

i.   Randomized evaluations: the assessment done based on randomly selected treatment group (beneficiaries), while keeping other identical group as control.

 

ii.   Pre-test/post-test with random assignment: Data will be collect before and after the intervention; here subjects are randomly assigned to a group that receives the any kind of intervention and compares to other one that doesn’t receive the intervention (control group).

 

iii.   Post test only randomized experiment: here two groups are randomly assigned the subjects and treatment conditions; the data will be collected only after the intervention.

 

ii. Quasi-Experimental approaches:

a.  Pre-test/post-test with non-random assignment: Here the difference is assigning subjects to the intervention and comparison group is non-random. In this design, the data are collected both before and after the intervention given.

 

b. Two groups post-test only with non-random assignment: Data are collected here only after the intervention given, and both the receiver and non-receiver group of the technology/intervention will be consult.

 

c.  Double difference or difference-in-differences (DID) methods: here it estimates the effect of a specific intervention by comparing the changes in outcome over a period of time. Here we require a baseline data and follow up for both treatment and control group. After the intervention again the data will be collected to assess the differences in treatment and control groups because of intervention.

 

d. Regression discontinuity design: pre-test and post test comparison made which obtain the differences but here subjects are assigned to intervention or comparison groups solely basis on cut-off score.

 

iii.  Non-experimental designs:

a. Pre-test/post-test designs: based on specific outcome indicators researchers measure the pre-and post-intervention differences.

 

b. Time-series designs: here over the time changes in outcome indicator is estimated.

 

c.  Longitudinal Study: researchers take repetitive observation of the same variables from the same subject group or people.

 

Other than these approaches researchers also uses economic impact assessment approaches and some participatory impact assessment approaches which uses participatory tools combined with other conventional statistical approaches. There are several impact assessment studies done in social sector Roche, C (1999), Mukherjee et al., 2019; and in basic sectors Maity et al., 2016 etc.

 Conclusion:

Impact assessment of agricultural research remains always an important part, without which the whole research cycle is incomplete. But nowadays, research agency has major interest on economic impacts of the agricultural technologies and pursued by social aspects like livelihood as well as food security.

 

 References:  

Baker, J.L. (2000). Evaluating the impact of development projects on poverty: A handbook for practitioners. Washington D.C. World Bank.

Joshi P.K. (2003). Impact assessment of Agricultural Research-Concepts and Measurement. Task force on Prioritization, Monitoring & Evaluation, NATP.   

INTRAC (2015). Outputs, Outcomes and Impact. Retrieved from https://www.intrac.org/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Monitoring-and-Evaluation-Series-Outcomes-Outputs-and-Impact-7.pdf

Roche, C (1999). Impact Assessment for Development Agencies. Oxford: Oxfam/NOVIB.

Mukherjee, A., Singh, P., Rakshit, S., Satyapriya., Burman, R. R., Shubha, K., ... & Nikam, V (2019). Effectiveness of poultry based farmers’ producer organization and its impact on livelihood enhancement of rural women. Indian J. Anim. Sci, 89, 1152-1160.

Maity, A., Vijay, D., Mukherjee, A., & Lamichaney, A. (2016). Potential impacts of climate change on quality seed production: a perspective of hill agriculture. In Conservation agriculture (pp. 459-485). Springer, Singapore.

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