Poverty alleviation through agricultural research: the ACIAR experience

A recent external review of ACIAR (Nairn et al 1998) recommended (p 42) that ACIAR should more effectively communicate the way in which the benefits flow from ACIAR projects to ultimately achieve poverty alleviation. Yet we find the targeting and evaluation of poverty alleviation aspects of our research to be a difficult, complex and imperfect task. In this paper, the mechanisms that ACIAR uses in attempting to do so are explained, as are some of the problems, and lessons.