IFC has made agribusiness a priority because of its potential for broad development impact and
especially strong role in poverty reduction. As part of the Development Impact Department
evaluation strategy in strengthening learning and use of evaluations to identify what works and
what does not work, a series of meta-evaluations in strategic areas of IFC are being conducted.
The first meta-evaluation analyzed job creation effects of private sector interventions. This study
is the second in the series. It synthesizes evaluations of private sector interventions in two
Agribusiness-related sectors: Access to Finance (A2F) and Farmer/Business Training.
The evaluation started with synthesizing information from 22 previously conducted metaevaluations,
systematic reviews, and sector and impact evaluations to identify what we have
already learned and the gaps that need to be filled. A search for evaluations conducted between
2000 and 2012 resulted in a sample of 851 evaluations related to farmers/ rural households.
Pre-screening these evaluations with nine interventions that were identified as broad categories
of IFC’s work resulted in 300 reports that were further narrowed down to 135 reports focused on
A2F (61) and Farmer/Business Training (74). A quality assessment on these reports, conducted
independently by two experts through a double screening of full texts, resulted in 17 A2F
evaluations and 27 training evaluations that were able to show that results can be attributed to
the interventions that were implemented. This means that a total of 66 studies were used as the
basis for this evaluation: 44 impact evaluations (using randomized control trials and quasiexperimental
designs) that passed the assessment for quality and the 22 other meta evaluations
and reviews/studies that provided information of what we know from previous studies.