Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awards grant to plan an Agriculture Learning and Impacts Network (ALINe)

Over the coming months, Keystone, working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Institute of Development Studies, will design and plan an Agricultural Learning and Impacts Network (ALINe) to be launched at the beginning of 2010 that will seek to transform evaluative thinking and practice in agriculture. The planning grant website can be found at www.alineplanning.org

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will, over the next few years, invest unprecedented levels of resources in transforming smallholder agriculture.  Their extraordinary goals demand an impact planning, assessment and learning (IPAL) system for helping the Gates Foundation understand how to maximize and accelerate the attainment of those goals.  The ALINe project seeks to bring about the required step change in evaluative thinking and practice in agriculture to keep pace with the Foundation's goals, providing evaluation-related support to Foundation grantees, the Foundation itself, and the wider field of agricultural development.

A key feature of the planning year will be the implementation of comparative constituency feedback surveys that will collect the perceptions of smallholder farmers on the performance and impacts of the Foundation’s grantees.

For more information please contact Keystone's Chief Executive, David Bonbright.