The ImpresS team (consisting of agents from the Impact and Marketing Service and for the Innovation Research Unit) has developped principles and tools to mainstream impact culture withing Cirad and with our partners, both before and after their research for development interventions:  

• The ImpresS ex post method enables researchers to better understand the innovation process triggered by their interventions and their impacts. This method has two main particularities: being participatory, as major actors are involved in the analysis of the intervention impacts. Moreover, this approach enhances the learning processes and capacity strengthening between the different actors (researchers, farmers, producer organizations …). 
• The ImpresS ex ante approach supports the formulation of a common vision and plausible impact pathway of an intervention, taking impact into account since the conception of research for development interventions.This ImpresS ex ante approach consists on building hypothetical but plausible impact pathways, focusing first on the crucial step of the outcome generation (outcomes being the appropriation/use/adaptation of the intervention products (or outputs) by actors. During the implementation of an intervention, adjustments and adaptations to the initial impact pathway identified might occur. ImpresS ex ante includes the definition of a monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) system focused on outcomes that will enable strategic management and understanding of outcome generating processes. The ImpresS ex ante approach also has a major objective of communicating with partner institutions and donors on CIRAD future interventions and their plausible impacts. 
• A support to building outcome oriented monitoring and evaluation systems, following ImpresS ex ante principles and tools for interventions implementation. 

Since 2021, CIRAD also created a funding mechanism to support the development of evaluation and impact culture. This mechanism funds alternatively outcome evaluations (of short term interventions like projects) and ImpresS ex post impact evaluations (of mid-long term innovation processes). 

Governance (01/07/2023) 

Coordination: Sylvain Perret / Aurelle de Romémont  

ImpresS team: Aurelle de Romemont, Claudio Proietti, Nabil Hasnaoui Amri, Emmanuel Raison (DIMS), Genowefa Blundo Canto, Marie Ferré, Chloé Alexandre (UMR Innovation).  

Contact: equipeimpress@cirad.fr