Oxfam Together Against Poverty Multi-Country Agriculture and Climate Change Adaptation Advocacy Program Evaluation

This is an evaluation of The Oxfam Together Against Poverty (TAP) multi-country agriculture and climate change adaptation advocacy program. This project has been operating in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, Italy, The Netherlands, Brussels (focused on the EU), and Addis Ababa/Nairobi (focused on the African Union) since 2015 and in France since 2018. This evaluation covers the work undertaken between 2018 and 2021.

The evaluation found that the program contributed to important outcomes in quantity and quality of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in Europe, and in small scale farmer and female farmer friendly policies in Africa. As with all advocacy programs, no outcome can be attributed to a single source, since policy change is subject to so many complex forces. Instead, this review looks at what the contribution of the program was to the outcomes that actually occurred. While some outcomes are intermediary – such as verbal commitments by policy makers, or new platforms for civil society representation – they are nonetheless potential stepping stones to future ultimate outcomes.

Based on the outcomes from this evaluation, several recommendations are made: 1) improve local to global linkages, and build joint activities explicitly into work plans; 2) African country programs need to integrate CAADP work into their dialogue with governments, or abandon engagement with the AU around it; 3) continue to support efforts for farmers to have greater input into budgets, especially through the use of gender responsive budgeting including expanding the use of the method shows promise, especially in training key government officials across countries on how to do it; 4) The review found that work on climate change adaptation is already built into the program in its promotion of women in agriculture and in promoting agroecology. If staff and partners want to expand their work on adaptation, the program could promote a wider set of resilience building activities for rural residents, beyond agriculture; 5) share media resources across countries, and developing the capacity to assess the results of media engagement; 6) build the capacity of farmer groups, rather than just individuals, and facilitating them to form strong coalitions can have long term benefits. Oxfam can play a facilitating role with strengthened groups and coalitions.

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