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Expanding your impact on world poverty

When you donate to TechnoServe, you aren’t just helping increase revenue for hardworking farmers, food processors, and small business owners. You’re creating pathways out of poverty for them, their family members, new job recipients, and other workers in the value chain. It’s a ripple effect of tangible benefits, and it all starts with your generous support.

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Our data analysis

A measured approach

TechnoServe rigorously tracks the revenues of the people and businesses we partner with—along with many other indicators—to ensure the effectiveness of our projects. We then analyze these data to identify successful project models and learn how to improve future approaches. 

Because transparency is the cornerstone of TechnoServe’s measurement approach, what we see is what you see. We share data on all of our projects. We believe this transparency can inform greater and more effective programs aimed at reducing poverty, both within TechnoServe and in the broader development community.

Chicken

The amazing thing about TechnoServe is that once they come on board to support you, they hold you up all the way. The training experience and the follow ups is more than any individual could offer me. They have walked with me on this journey and as a widow and a mother of three, I require no extra financial support from anyone because of this project.

Tabitha Muthoni, Kenya
Happy Small Business Owner

By the numbers

$5.60 average income gain for $1 in program cost

Just as investors seek the maximum financial return for their clients, TechnoServe works to turn every program dollar into the greatest possible income gains for our clients: the hardworking people eager to better their lives. 

African Women Carrying Food

A Different Way to Make a Difference: TechnoServe’s 2023 annual report

Read The Report

Women in El Salvador

Creating youth opportunities in El Salvador

Read The Article

Benin Group Panel

4 digital tools fighting poverty in Benin

Read The Article

What we prioritize

3 keys to greater impact on global poverty

We are building on our foundational strengths and expanding our work in three key areas that address some of the most promising opportunities for progress.

1

Regenerative business for people, nature, and climate—we help our clients build farms, enterprises, and markets that help to restore natural resources and fight climate change

2

Nutritious, inclusive, and sustainable food systems—we build and strengthen markets where food businesses are able to spread prosperity across the value chain

3

Decent work for the next generations—we support individuals—especially youth—in finding employment or building their own enterprises

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Your generosity at scale

Climate change. Unemployment. Weakening food systems. Donating to TechnoServe means you’re helping tackle some of the biggest challenges known to humankind.

External evaluations of our work

The rigorous pursuit of results measurement

Whenever possible, we leverage external evaluators to conduct independent assessments and evaluate our implementation model using experimental design methods. We’ve highlighted some of our most rigorous results here.

Our review of the external and internal evidence for TechnoServe’s impact highlights several key insights:

1

Market-oriented interventions that combine capacity building and linkages to resources and markets can have a positive impact

2

Shifting small farmers from subsistence agriculture to a market-oriented focus, particularly on globally traded export crops, can be transformative for their livelihoods and welfare

3

No intervention works all of the time. Creating impact requires high-quality implementation and effective tailoring of interventions to each local context

We’ve incorporated these insights into our project design, and continue to invest in research that will help us hone our approach to creating more inclusive market systems.

Happy Mother and Her Son
Happy Man with Coffee

Impact Matters

Auditing our impact

In 2017, TechnoServe engaged ImpactMatters, an impact audit firm founded with support from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), to review several projects within our portfolio. TechnoServe is the first large organization to undergo an impact audit with ImpactMatters, which assesses the quality and cost effectiveness of an organization’s impact. We believe that value for money and the sustainability of development interventions are crucial factors to consider when assessing the success of development efforts.

The impact audit for four of our projects – Coffee Initiative IIImpulsa Tu EmpresaMejoramiento Agrícola Sostenible, and Women Mean Business – showed strong results, finding participants earned up to $34 in net revenue for every dollar TechnoServe spent on projects. Most projects also received a good rating for quality of evidence.

ImpactMatters’ audit, published in March 2018, confirms the powerful impact that TechnoServe projects can have and demonstrate the importance of a rigorous, transparent accounting of impact.

Randomized Controlled Trials and Quasi-Experimental Impact Evaluations

Randomized controlled trials, or RCTs, are often referred to as the gold standard in impact evaluation. In an RCT, evaluators randomly assign a set of community members to receive project assistance (known as the treatment group) or to receive no additional assistance (known as the control group). The evaluators then capture and statistically analyze data across the treatment and control groups to quantify the project’s impact. In projects that use quasi-experimental design, evaluators use different techniques to approximate a control group or counterfactual when true randomization is unfeasible.

We enthusiastically support any opportunity to evaluate our projects to this degree of rigor, while acknowledging the difficulty of running RCTs in development interventions. As we continue to seek opportunities to implement RCTs and quasi-experimental impact evaluations, we also encourage projects to implement creative and resourceful ways of measuring impact where measurement resources are limited.

Womens Equality
  • STRYDE (2020, 3ie and IPA) This RCT measured the effect of entrepreneurial and personal effectiveness training on Tanzanian youth’s incomes 2 years after the training. The results found significant increase in earnings for women, but not for men, with a break even point of 15 months. The research also showed significant impacts for both men and women across psychosocial wellbeing, market-relevant skills, intimate partner violence, and a host of other outcomes. 
  • Impulsa Tu Empresa (2020, Miami University) – This mixed-method analysis found 13.2 percent in sales relative to the pre-acceleration period and found that access to resources is insufficient on its own, and secondary in importance to building entrepreneurial skill when promoting business acceleration.
  • Business Women Connect (2018, World Bank)This RCT measures the effect of business training and increased access to a mobile savings platform on Tanzanian women micro entrepreneurs’ ability to save. While the study found demonstrable impact on the wellbeing of entrepreneurs, it found no improvement in profit. 
  • Women Mean Business (2017, IPA) – This RCT found that training and mentorship programs aimed to help SMEs develop business expansion strategies in Uganda resulted in an average increase in monthly revenues by 22 percent and take home income from business by 17 percent for women-led business 3 years after the intervention. Increased share of  take-home earnings indicate greater financial security for households of businesswomen. (draft report)
Agriculture
  • Contract Farming R&D (2016, IDInsight) – The pilot program which was launched to assist farmers adopt improved agricultural technology had some very positive impacts. Assistance to integrate farmers into contract farming increased the proportion of farmers planting reliable hybrid maize by 40 percent. 
  • Coffee Initiative II (2013, Laterite) –  Participation in the agronomy training program resulted in an increase in yields of up to 75.5 percent for farmers in 2011. Estimates at the cooperative level also show positive changes, with one cooperative experiencing an increase in yield as high as 148.1 percent after one year of training.
  • Coffee Initiative II (2012, JPAL/IPA) – This RCT found that training in good agronomic practices resulted in farmers being more knowledgeable about best practices. Trained farmers were significantly more likely to have adopted good agronomic practices on their coffee plantations. 
  • Coffee Initiative II (2016, TripleLine) – This ex-post evaluation found evidence that farmers continue to apply improved agronomic practices five years after the end of TechnoServe’s intervention. It found evidence of continued investment in coffee washing stations and sustained price premiums for coffee. (Read a summary of the findings here)
  • Mejoramiento Agrícola Sostenible (MAS) (2017, ANED) Examined an agronomic training program in coffee and bean value chains in Honduras using a quasi-experimental control group. It found that trained farmers had statistically significant improvements in farming practice that led to a 48% improvement in coffee yields over the control group.

Other Evaluative Work

Even when academic-quality research is not an option, TechnoServe regularly pursues working with reputable external firms to pursue the highest standard of evaluation. Below is a selection of the findings from these partnerships. 

Small Farmers Looking at Cashews

Forthcoming Research

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