Evaluations should use remote sensing and geospatial analysis to provide more credible and precise estimates of changes in land use and agricultural production. This evaluation provided further evidence of the limitations in measuring agricultural production at two points in time. The rainfall when baseline data collection was completed in 2012 was considerably higher than in 2017 when the interim was collected. This reduced the meaningfulness of pre-post comparisons. This is especially the case with the farmer training evaluation where farmers adopted improved practices and techniques, but yields decreased. This also hinders evaluation-based cost-benefit analyses to provide precise estimates of the project’s economic rate of return. MCC is addressing this lesson by convening a panel of experts to assess MCC’s recent evaluation results and propose new methods, potentially such as using remote imagery, to enhance MCC’s ability to reliably estimate the economic effects of irrigation and other agricultural investments on income growth and poverty alleviation. One possible approach could be to measure a three-year average production before intervention and compare with a similar average after. MCC is increasingly requesting evaluation teams include geospatial experts as key personnel so that geospatial analysis and remote sensing are considered early on in the evaluation and can make use of best practice in measuring land use changes.
Lesson Learned