Plenty of highlights, but still room to improve
Our Highlights and Performance Report for 2021 is now available. It shows some major steps forward in smallholder agriculture, despite the pandemic. Local publications add detail. Further reporting improvements are on their way.
In September 2021, we launched our strategy for 2021-2025. The report shows that we are already well on our way to achieving the targets it set. Some of the 2021 improvements are huge. For example: Despite Covid, some 239,000 farmers accessed SFSA-supported insurance products. That was an increase of 81%. Overall, our programs supported more than 1.3 million smallholders, 53% more than in 2020. This work cost less than $28 per farmer – including developing and trialing the many innovations yet to reach the field.
That is good progress, but no reason for complacency. Our strategy isn’t cast in stone. We continue to refine the targets and set additional ones. This Report already includes some data not featured in the two previous editions.
“Importantly”, comments our Executive Director, Simon Winter, “we are now also landing the strategy into action at the country level”. We’ll be reporting more on this soon. Some consequences are already clear, however: “Refreshing local strategies will stimulate further updates to our 2025 targets in the second half of this year”, Simon adds. “We are also adding new indicators, notably in climate-smart, resilient agriculture. ‘CSRA’ is on track to become an integral part of all our programs.”
Andrea Balmer, who leads our reporting work, looks forward to readers’ comments. In the context of local implementation, she also points to two national publications on our Reports page. “The teams in Indonesia and Mali have recently completed their reviews of 2021”, she says. “These are great additions to our overall Performance Report because they go into much more detail than we can at an international level.”
Together with Yuan Zhou and Alva Kretschmer from our Policy team, Andrea has recently compiled a staff guide to impact measurement. “It suggests some methodologies that should help us to get better data”, she comments. “We’re particularly interested in impacts that the Foundation is not yet consistently collecting across all programs.” High on the measurement priority list are increases in smallholder incomes.
So: After three years of steady improvements in our Performance reporting, look out for more next year!
