To more systematically measure its impact, IFPRI launched a coordinated impact assessment effort in 1996. The objectives of IFPRI's impact assessment activities are to:

• ensure accountability of IFPRI to its clients
• maintain credibility with clients
• improve IFPRI's internal decisionmaking process and our capacity to learn from past experiences
• ensure that IFPRI's work continues to remain relevant and useful in a rapidly changing world

To meet these objectives, IFPRI developed five priority areas for its impact assessment (IA) research:

• to expand the information available on how to measure the benefits of policy-oriented social science research
• to qualitatively determine how policymakers and others use policy-focused research results
• to assess how IFPRI's research in thematic areas influences the countries where the research is conducted and beyond into the international arena
• to study the impacts of specific research projects at the country level
• to conduct an integrated assessment of IFPRI's past research in numerous areas

These areas continue to be cogent but in recent years, with the advent of the CGIAR Science Council (SC) replacing the former Technical Advisory Committee, IFPRI is in addition endeavoring to align its IA work with the broader, Systemwide ambitions of the SC Standing Panel on Impact Assessment (SPIA), which also include advancing methods for IA, e.g., at http://impact.cgiar.org/methods/methodsintro.asp

SPIA has developed an active concern for documenting the impact of policy-oriented research (POR), arguing that relative to, say crop improvement research in the CGIAR, this increasing share of the overall effort of the System (running at about one-third of total resource commitment) has been less studied for the benefits yielded to society. Accordingly, in October 2006 it convened a focused meeting in Nairobi on PORIA for the whole CGIAR System (materials - PDF Download ) and a Scoping Paper (PDF Download) was developed.

Subsequently, SPIA conducted a grant competition to commission detailed case studies of Policy-Oriented Research Impact Assessment (PORIA) and at a meeting held in IFPRI in February 2007, an expert panel assisted the finalist in refining the studies proposed for the calendar year 2007. The meeting's Synthesis Report (PDF Download) includes the IFPRI proposal on research informing conditional cash transfer policy being led by Professor Jere Behrman, University of Pennsylvania.