Client Context

Kenyan agriculture carries a structural contradiction: it employs the majority of the rural workforce and anchors the economy, yet it is dominated by smallholders exposed to increasingly erratic rainfall, drought cycles, and degraded natural resources. The Kenya Climate Smart Agriculture Project was among the government's most significant responses, a World Bank-financed operation promoting climate-smart practices, strengthened agricultural research and seed systems, and community-driven investments intended to raise productivity while building resilience to climate shocks.

Programmes of this scale end with an obligation as important as any disbursement: an honest account of what changed. The World Bank's results architecture requires it, the National Treasury's future borrowing decisions depend on it, and the design of successor programmes is only as good as the evidence inherited from the last one.

The Challenge

Evaluating a national agriculture programme is methodologically unforgiving. Productivity and income changes among smallholder farmers must be measured across dispersed rural populations, then attributed credibly to project interventions rather than to weather, prices, or parallel programmes operating in the same counties. The evaluation had to work from the project's own accountability documents, the key performance indicators in the results framework and the intermediate outcome indicators in the Project Appraisal Document, so that findings would map directly onto the commitments made to the financier.

The assessment also had to go beyond indicator arithmetic. The evaluation was required to judge the project against the established criteria of relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency, and to extract the lessons and experiences that would guide future agricultural development programming. That demanded field evidence gathered from farmers and implementing institutions, quantitative rigour in the analysis, and the evaluative judgment to explain not just what the numbers were but why.

Our Approach

ACAL structured the evaluation to meet World Bank evidentiary standards while capturing the ground-level reality of smallholder experience.