| Sumario: | Billions of dollars have already been invested in CSA programs, with even more spending planned in coming years. These programs aim to help smallholder farmers increase productivity while also adapting to and mitigating climate change. Measuring the impacts of these programs, however, has proved difficult. There are no agreed international metrics or systems for monitoring CSA programs, and different institutions use different approaches. If CSA is to attract financing and become an effective mechanism for change, coherent and consistent monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is needed. There are good reasons why tracking progress regarding CSA has proved challenging. CSA has three primary objectives— productivity, adaptation and mitigation—each of which has multiple dimensions. Further, implementation of CSA is tailored to the specific context. That specificity helps make CSA programs effective, but it also makes their outcomes hard to measure in aggregate. The challenge is finding ways to evaluate the local impacts of CSA and draw lessons that can be applied more generally, across projects and scales and serve multiple purposes. Working in collaboration with national and international partners, ICRAF has examined what is needed to improve M&E of CSA with the goals to create M&E systems that will help programs adaptively manage and tell their stories more robustly. This brief highlights some of these efforts.
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