GloMIP’s Impact Opportunities Portal empowers evidence based decision making

Bert Lenaerts, Matty Demont, Neale Paguirigan, Ruvicyn Bayot

The GloMIP Impact Opportunities Portal provides access to about 200 development and crop production indicators, measuring impact opportunities across five CGIAR Impact Areas, 45 crops (including 20 CGIAR crops), and 171 countries. Where data was not initially measured at crop level, the portal overlaps national-level indicators with crop production or consumption through spatial grid overlaying or statistical downscaling to quantify crop-specific impact opportunities. Additionally, the portal enables customized and automatic analysis of indicators, either separately (single-indicator), pairwise (dual-indicator), or groupwise (multi-indicator) and by indexing (priority index).

By summarizing impact opportunities, that is, crop-specific underdevelopment indicators related to agriculture and food, the portal helps identify hotspots for specific development challenges. Surveying and hot spotting indicators across countries, regions, crops, market segments, and breeding pipelines can be used for the following:

• Set priorities for resource allocation, such as within CGIAR breeding programs
• Request and justify resource mobilization for proposal writing
• Check the current state of development across the five Impact Areas for inclusion in publications (reports, papers, book chapters, presentations)
• Check whether market segmentation aligns with global sustainable development needs
• Aid market segments opportunity scoping (national cropping area, yield, and price data from FAO form a starting point for market segmentation)

Evidence-based decision-making empowers development by enabling professionals to make informed choices that are rational-unbiased from existing beliefs-and contribute to positive outcomes and sustainable progress. The portal's comprehensive coverage and user-friendly tools help users overcome impediments to evidence-based decision-making, such as resource constraints, complexity of evidence, and overreliance on expert opinions. The resource limitations such as lack of time or access to data can hinder efforts by smaller organizations or those in resource-constrained environments to implement evidence-based practices. Additionally, the portal will aid decision-makers that may struggle to understand complex statistical analysis or evaluate conflicting studies. Finally, while expert opinions are valuable, relying solely on them can lead to bias. Combining expert insights with empirical evidence leads to more balanced decisions.

Given the portal's unique features and extensive datasets, there is a potential to train users from other centers and beyond CGIAR to utilize the portal effectively. By empowering users with the necessary skills, this initiative can foster broader understanding and utilization of the portal's capabilities, thereby maximizing its impact across various sectors and regions.