An emerging partnership between KIPPRA, IFPRI and ONE CGIAR
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is initiating the first steps towards implementing the ONE CGIAR initiative “National Policies and Strategies” (NPS) for food, land, and water system transformation https://www.cgiar.org/ . This initiative together with other expected ONE CGIAR initiatives such as “Foresight and Metrics” are built on the premise that more evidence-based, coordinated, and intersectoral policymaking approaches can drive sector systems, investment, research, and innovation that generate more equitable food, nutrition, and water security outcomes at a national and sub-national level. In view of these upcoming developments, IFPRI conducted a virtual workshop with its longstanding partner and Kenya’s think tank, Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA), on Tuesday, 1st February 2022.
Several areas of joint research, capacity building and policy communication have been identified during the workshop:
Area 1: Analysis of policies and strategies for growth and rural transformation using economy-wide and multi-market models. This work package entails co-developing datasets and models and working with a coalition of policy actors in Kenya to analyze current policies and co-identify policy goals and objectives that hold potential to support transformative change and address policy incoherence across sectors to drive food, land, and water systems transformation — while avoiding negative trade-offs.
Area 2: Investment prioritization: Supporting strategic public and private investments. This will involve continuation of CGIAR work with governments and a coalition of policy actors, employing tools and approaches to co-prioritize public and private investments that have potential to deliver more equitable and sustainable food, land, and water system transformation. This work package will work with other One CGIAR initiatives to ensure synergies between policies and investment-ready, scalable innovations.
Area 3: Implementation capacity: Next generation research, analysis, and policy development. The work package will use political economy tools, impact evaluations, and implementation research to support the translation of investments into national and sub-national implementation programs, identifying drivers of change and feeding lessons back to policy and program design. It will also build policy think tank capacity to better support governments and improve accountability and transparency toward agreed outcomes.
Further, to the identified areas of collaborations during the workshop, there was a detailed deliberations on how specifically the different areas would be approached in the following work packages:
Work package 1 on Economy-wide and multi-market modeling, which involve first, global modelling by assessing the global trends and its impact on Kenya using IMPACT model and finally produce a joint model-based research paper. Second is jointly construct Kenya computable general equilibrium model (K-CGE) and Social Accounting Matrices (SAM) at country and sub-country level by building on existing IFPRI standard CGE model and KIPPRA model and by involving other players. Last, integrated global-national-sub-national modeling framework.
Work package 2 on County-level public spending assessment tool entails development of a county engagement framework, construction of county-level public spending database by collating historical county level data and developing county data template that is detailed on counties information on costs/ benefits for the public spending, then using the datasets to construct a simple county level public spending assessment tool.
Work package 3 on mainstreaming gender in data, analysis and policies is approached by first exploring IFPRI-KIPPRA collaboration in the context of IFPRI’s planned Africa Gender hub. Second inclusion of IFPRI’s PRO-WEIA tool in household surveys and technical support to KIPPRA’s gender unit. Last, involve in cross cutting activities mainly on capacity building on policy analysis on both state and non-state staff.
The deliberated next step from the workshop would be to have technical meeting to work on the workplans for each work package, then a joint meeting to discuss the work packages developed by technical teams for implementation.
