Data as a Spur to Improved Action

What’s a “good” performance? As a fan of football – soccer to some – that’s a question I often ask about my favorite English team, Tottenham Hotspur. In a few weeks, ‘Spurs’ will be starting its 117th season. Longevity can certainly be a mark of good performance. Spurs have had 45 successive years in the top division suggests excellent management of that performance (in general!). Last season, they finished fourth, which made long-term fans like me pretty happy. But…

There’s always a “but” in performance, isn’t there? And they’re often the bits we can learn most from. ?Data helps us ask the right questions. At Spurs, a big “but” was finishing 22 points behind the champions. Benefiting from others' failings doesn’t make Spurs excellent. Their manager Antonio Conte has plenty to think about!

What’s all that got to do with the Syngenta Foundation (SFSA)??

Well, we’ve just issued our Highlights and Performance Report. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it. This Report is the third of its kind, based on extensive data collection. It includes some measures not featured in the previous editions. The data bring lots of good news. We are well on our way to achieving the targets set in our strategy last year. For fans of longevity as “good” performance: We’ve been working for 40 years and keep getting better. And some of the improvements are huge. For example: Despite Covid, our programs supported more than 1.3 million smallholders in 2021. That was 53% more than in 2020. Some 239,000 farmers accessed SFSA-supported insurance products, an increase of?81%. And we did that at a modest cost per farmer. Taking our entire partnership resources mobilized of $36.2million, this equated to less than $28 per farmer supported. And please remember that a significant part of our work is developing and trialing innovations that are not yet reaching farmers.

While numbers that size may sound like the ag development equivalent of soccer’s Premier League. And yes, like Spurs’ performance, they make me pretty happy. But we know we need to get better. We continue to refine the targets and set additional ones. We’re now landing the strategy into action at the country level. That will soon stimulate further updates to our 2025 targets. We’re adding new indicators to measure, notably in climate-smart, resilient agriculture. We also need to improve data collection and understanding of impact.?Our report includes farmer feedback from surveys conducted with 60decibels. In India, we have evidence of average annual per farmer income increases of around $100. We recently launched an internal impact management guide.

As I frequently say?in my posts, however: We can’t get better on our own! We’re always keen to establish and expand partnerships. That is especially true for the creation of ‘catalytic intermediaries’ for innovation and scaling. (Plenty of room for improvement there). But it also applies to impact enhancement, Learning & Development, and judging what “good” means – i.e. performance monitoring and impact evaluation and research. ?

If your feel spurred to improve action, please get in touch!?