This post is written by Tara Chiu and Stephine Ogutu.

The challenges of poverty and resilience are dynamic and changing. Sustaining and making this kind of economic innovation effective ultimately requires shifting the locus of research control to local researchers. 

The Feed the Future Advancing Local Leadership, Innovation and Networks (ALL-IN) program is a Feed the Future-funded collaborative research grant program that supports African researchers in development economics and related fields to take the lead in defining research priorities. Shifting research leadership to African countries provides historically under-resourced local researchers and institutions the funding to further strengthen capacity and use their clear pathways to policy impacts.

Co-managed by the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk and Resilience (MRR Innovation Lab) at the University of California, Davis, and the Nairobi-based International Centre for Evaluation and Development (ICED), Feed the Future ALL-IN is designed to nurture leadership and innovation in impact evaluation for development by mobilizing the emergent capacity of African universities and research institutions. It serves as a model to increase local leadership and innovation to meet local development challenges in a way that is inclusive, effective and sustainable.

“Flipping the Model” of Research Collaboration

The inception of the Feed the Future ALL-IN model dates to a meeting of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Assets and Market Access, a precursor to the MRR Innovation Lab. The 2016 meeting in Washington, D.C., drew together principal investigators for a technical meeting, providing an avenue to share their innovative research and draw in peer feedback and support to strengthen their work. 

David Ameyaw, CEO of ICED, was attending as a representative of the board of directors. Between presentations, they collectively imagined how this model for development research collaborations could be brought on-continent and put in the hands of local researchers.

Three years later, this vision became a reality with the establishment of Feed the Future ALL-IN. This initiative flips the traditional model of collaboration that was part of the historical CRSP (now Innovation Labs), which began with a US-based PI proposing a project and brining in host country researchers. 

The MRR Innovation Lab held a dedicated funding window in which host country researchers took the lead in defining research projects, bringing in U.S.-based counterparts, and submitted proposals for large-scale research funding of up to $450,000. There are currently 12 Feed the Future ALL-IN research projects led from African research institutions that are testing financial and market innovations that take the most promising agricultural tools for families in developing economies from the lab to the field.

The Feed the Future ALL-IN model helps to further USAID’s vision for the Local Capacity Strengthening Policy, investing in local partners for development. Building on a foundation of existing knowledge, skills and experience, Feed the Future ALL-IN positions local researchers to lead evidence generation and translate research results in an impactful and sustainable way.

Research Impacts

The transition to locally led research requires the support of researchers and institutions that have the skills, talent and ideas for impactful research, even if lacking in experience implementing and managing large-scale research projects. Feed the Future ALL-IN funding provides the opportunity for institutions — both researchers and staff — to learn by doing in collaboration with mentors and peers at the initiative’s management institutions. 

The Feed the Future ALL-IN collaborative team provides support and capacity strengthening as necessary and appropriate to researchers and their project managers to enhance capacity to manage and lead similar large-scale research awards in the future. 

Makerere University’s Florence Muhanguzi, one of the 12 principal investigators, is leading a research project seeking to strengthen the resilience and empowerment of women smallholder farmers in Uganda. 

“Engaging with new tools in the field such as the project level project level Women Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) and gender transformative approaches has been empowering and enabled me to translate theory to practice. I have been teaching gender studies for over 20 years, but had not engaged with translating theory to practice,” says Muhanguzi.

These investments in “learning by doing” for research leadership and administration is having impacts far beyond the initial investments of the Feed the Future ALL-IN initiative. For example, capacity strengthening programs by ALL-IN has enabled some of the researchers to pursue new opportunities with greater success. 

Muhanguzi provides one of many examples of these impacts. She notes, “The knowledge, skills and confidence acquired from engaging in ALL-IN capacity strengthening events enabled me to apply and win a large grant from the International Development Research Centre. As an African researcher, I now know that you can apply for a large grant and win.”

Pathways to Policy Impacts

Feed the Future ALL-IN not only leverages the expertise of local researchers, but also their unique positioning for policy impacts through meaningful engagement with local stakeholders and policymakers. This approach maximizes potential for sustainable impacts through more effective application, transfer and scale of research results.

Many Feed the Future ALL-IN projects are direct collaborations with policymakers to promote direct integration of research results into local policies. For example, a project in Kenya is being conducted in cooperation with the Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture Project (KCSAP), a Government of Kenya project jointly supported by the World Bank, designed to increase the accessibility of agro-weather advisories and market information for smallholder farming communities.

“Through the Feed the Future ALL-IN initiative, we are strengthening locally led research solutions to local development challenges experienced in smallholder agriculture. We hope that insights from these projects will be instrumental not only in advancing adoption of improved technologies by smallholder farmers, but also in shaping evidence-informed policymaking by development partners,” says David Ameyaw, CEO of ICED and co-director of Feed the Future ALL-IN.

A New Way of Doing Things

The solicitation for the inaugural cohort of Feed the Future ALL-IN projects demonstrated the clear need for this model. The solicitation received more than 160 expressions of interest and more than 120 full proposals, with funding only available for twelve. 

The initiative’s management team held management workshops with unsuccessful applicants to assist in strengthening research design and proposal writing, which emphasized collaboration in peer working groups for feedback and support. After the workshops, there was a clear demand for continued capacity strengthening and peer collaboration.

Building off the immense response to the ALL-IN call for proposals, ICED and MRR are launching the ALL-IN Research Network (ARN). The vision of the ARN is African researchers generating actionable evidence to support effective development policies in their countries. The objectives of the ARN are not only to serve as a resource for members, but to serve as a center for research excellence for the global development community.

These emerging impacts from Feed the Future ALL-IN demonstrates what happens when local researchers are supported to lead in generating local solutions to challenges facing Africa. Achieving locally owned development requires stakeholders within the development ecosystem, including the donor community, to avail every necessary support needed to strengthen the Africa research ecosystem. 

This support, that may range from technical assistance to grants, is critical in furthering their work in shaping the development and implementation of evidence-based policies by governments. 

Tara Chiu is associate director of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Markets, Risk & Resilience.

Steve Ogutu leads communications for Feed the Future ALL-IN for the International Centre for Evaluation and Development.

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