Southern Africa trade and food security project : mid-term performance evaluation

This mid-term performance evaluation of the USAID Trade and Food Security Project (TFSP) addresses the following activities:

1. The Southern Africa Trade and Investment Hub (SATIH) ? launched September 2016

2. The Seed Trade Project (STP) ? launched September 2016

3. The Trade Policy Initiative (TPI) ? launched December 2013

As the project was run as three distinct activities under a common Project Appraisal Document (PAD), project-level performance largely reflects the sum performance of the three activities.

Although SATIH has met Y1 and Y2 targets for indicators such as value of exports and investment facilitated (notwithstanding the need for a significant ramp up in results to achieve LoP targets), in totality it has met just under half its indicator targets. Furthermore, the indicators provide an incomplete view of the overall performance. This reflects that they cover only a small proportion of the potential outputs and outcomes of the tasks undertaken. Where SATIH meets targets, this reflects a range of transaction-oriented successes in areas such as investment, exports, and grain trade. These successes, while important, have had weak contributions to the broader objectives of the activity. This reflects an insufficient systems view that led to upstream and downstream challenges reducing the scale of results, ineffective translation of transactional results into wider market systems changes, and, in some cases, the hub?s decision to undertake projects with poor additionality. Management challenges also led to a lack of prioritization and exacerbated siloed working, further reducing the relevance of SATIH's activities.

STP?s performance against indicator targets has been weaker, although since the project?s turnaround in 2017 STP has made steady progress in advancing a long-term Harmonized Seed Regulation System (HSRS) agenda and appears to have strong potential to reach LoP targets. Management changes enabled this improvement?including the re-location of STP from Pretoria to Lusaka, which has help deepen crucial stakeholder relationships. The sustainability of STP?s work poses a challenge, however, with additional work needed to fully embed HSRS across Southern Africa, some of which is beyond STP?s current scope.

As a cooperative agreement, TPI does not have LoP targets in the same form as the other two activities; nevertheless, TPI has earned the respect of stakeholders for the quality and usefulness of its efforts, and has largely fulfilled the scope of its work plan. Stakeholders report high application rate for knowledge gained from capacity building and policy dialogue interventions, while examples suggested TPI?s research is used in highly impactful ways (although that impact often is not tracked). However, the initiative?s effectiveness is reduced by insufficient government capacity to implement trade policy improvements; TPI?s narrow audience?predominantly government officials and researchers?compounds this challenge.

These findings reflect the five evaluative themes this work explores?the relevance of work delivered, management of activities and TFSP as a whole, sustainability of outcomes (equitableness and likelihood of survival past the LoP), best practices for future programming, and opportunities.

To inform this work, the evaluation team conducted 128 qualitative semi-structured interviews with 154 interviewees, reviewed 77+ project documents and additional data sources gathered in meetings with project stakeholders, received 321 survey responses, and held 5 working sessions with USAID/REGO.