About - AgResults

Why AgResults? A Brief History

Feeding the World

In much of the developing world, entrenched market failures stifle agricultural productivity, leading to food insecurity and undernourishment for hundreds of millions of people. As populations continue to grow, we must address these challenges by encouraging public and private actors to transform markets and improve the livelihoods of farmers and other vulnerable populations.

Incentives for the Private Sector Can Spur Innovation

Private sector agricultural research in developing countries accounts for only two percent of global spending on agricultural research and development. Publicly funded research and extension services cannot meet this gap in investment, and as a result, market failures often remain unsolved. However, there is an emerging consensus in favor of testing Pay-for-Results incentive approaches that use public financing to drive agricultural innovation and build inclusive markets for agricultural goods and services that benefit smallholder farmers.

G20 Leaders Voice Interest in “Pull Mechanisms”, or Pay-for-Results Prize Competitions, for Development

At the June 2010 G20 meeting, G20 leaders submitted the Toronto Summit Declaration, which called for the development of “innovative, results-based mechanisms […] to harness the creativity and resources of the private sector in achieving breakthrough innovations in food security and agriculture development in poor countries.” Later that year at the Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth, G20 leaders requested that international organizations “examine and recommend potential innovative results-based mechanisms […] for enhanced agricultural productivity.”

The concept of “pull mechanisms” for agriculture received its first explicit reference in the November 2011 Report of the G20 Development Working Group when G20 representatives stated that “to encourage public and private sector investment in agricultural research in developing countries, we support the implementation of the ‘Agriculture Pull Mechanisms’ initiative, and welcome projects that embrace an innovative, results-based approach.” In Innovation with Impact, a report commissioned by the G20, Bill Gates stated, “I believe this concept of pull mechanisms has real promise in the agricultural sector.”

Donors Explore Pull Mechanisms and Empower Smallholder Farmers

In response to these calls, a group of countries including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, created AgResults, a multilateral initiative incentivizing and rewarding high-impact agricultural innovations.

Two years later, at the G20 Summit in Los Cabos Mexico, the governments of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pledged $118 million to establish AgResults through a Financial Intermediary Fund operated by the World Bank. In 2016, the Department of the Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Australia, pledged an additional US $4 million, making the total AgResults Fund $122 million. Further funding has increased that total to $152 million.

AgResults Stakeholders

AgResults is overseen by a Steering Committee comprising representatives from each donor agency and the financial trustee. The Steering Committee is responsible for strategic oversight of the initiative, including making management decisions, approving design stages for each new project, and the monitoring of projects and the initiative as a whole. The Steering Committee includes representatives from:

Funds from donor countries are managed by the World Bank in its role as Trustee of the initiative.

A dedicated Secretariat supports project implementation, oversight and monitoring, project sourcing, peer review of new concepts, and outreach and communications.

A competitively selected Project Manager oversees each Challenge Project, working alongside competing private sector (and in a few cases NGO) organizations, and Verifiers. In some cases, additional technical support is required. The External Evaluator is responsible for measuring AgResults’ impacts and comparing them to traditional “push mechanisms” or grant-based development approaches.

The AgResults organizational structure can be seen in the diagram below.

Diagram of the AgResults organizational structure

Steering Committee

The AgResults Steering Committee comprises representatives from our five donor countries and the World Bank Group, who acts as the trustee. The Steering Committee is a collaborative body that works together to decide the direction and priorities of AgResults.

Nick Juleff

Gates Foundation – Deputy Director

Currently the Chair of the AgResults Steering Committee, Dr. Nick Juleff is a Deputy Director in the Agricultural Development program at the Gates Foundation. He is focused on supporting farmers and governments in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia for sustainable, inclusive agricultural transformation. Before his current tenure, Dr. Juleff was a Wellcome Trust Fellow, and has held various roles in academia, regulatory bodies, and the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Juleff qualified as a veterinary surgeon in South Africa, holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and is a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.

Christopher Yordy

Global Affairs Canada

Christopher Yordy has been engaged in agricultural programs and economic policy for nearly 10 years with the Canadian government and in previous work with NGOs and private sector partners. Mr. Yordy was also involved in the launch of the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund (CIFSRF) with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). This included Canadian university partners and researchers in the global South, investing in scaling up solutions to increase production, access, and consumption of safe and nutritious food. Several key areas of ongoing personal interest include value chains and market linkage projects, development finance, and user interaction design solutions with stakeholders around the world.

Luke Simmons

Australia Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) – Agriculture Sector Specialist

Luke Simmons is an Agriculture Sector Specialist with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). He is focused on helping smallholder farmers in the Asia-Pacific Region to improve climate resilience and livelihood opportunities from their farming systems. Mr. Simmons has worked in international agriculture development for the past 22 years, including living and working with farmers in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Timor-Leste, and Solomon Islands. Mr. Simmons has a Bachelor of Natural Resource Management from the University of Adelaide and a Master of Arts in Environmental Geography from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Rafael Flor

Gates Foundation – Senior Program Officer

Rafael Flor is a Senior Program Officer in the Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Development team. He has 20 years of progressive work experience in international development. He has held positions with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Armajaro Trading (now Ecom Trading), the MDG Centre | West & Central Africa, the United Nations Development Programme, and Escuela Agricola Panamericana, Zamorano. Mr. Flor has served as a member of the World Food Programme’s Working Group on Productive Safety Nets, the United Nations Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger, Peer Reviewer of the 2006 Environmental Performance Index, and the Danish Think Tank on Prevention of Food Loss and Waste’s Advisory Panel. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Engineering from Escuela Agrícola Panamerica, Zamorano.

Trustee

The World Bank Group acts as AgResults' Trustee and provides financial intermediary services that include, but are not limited to, receiving funds, holding funds, investing funds, and transferring them to recipients or other agencies for implementation as directed by the Secretariat on behalf of the Steering Committee. In addition to these basic financial management services, the World Bank provides additional financial analysis and financial guidance to the Steering Committee as requested, and is actively engaged in Steering Committee meetings as appropriate. The World Bank was also involved in the design and exploration of AgResults as an innovative finance initiative since its inception in 2010. The early involvement of the World Bank in this capacity reflects its comparative advantage in successfully bringing a number of innovative financial structures to the development community.

Larissa Vovk

World Bank – Trustee Team Lead

Serving as the Trustee Team Lead for AgResults, Larissa Vovk, CFA, is an Operations Officer in Trust Funds and Partnerships Department of Development Finance Vice Presidency (DFi) of the World Bank with more than 20 years of finance experience. In her position with the DFi Vice Presidency, she helps to manage and monitor procedures for World Bank development financing vehicles and to create and disseminate policies and business processes of financial intermediary funds. In addition to working on AgResults, Ms. Vovk is the Trustee Team Lead for the Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems (CREWS Initiative) and Debt Relieve Trust Fund. Prior to the World Bank, she worked for the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund. Ms. Vovk has a BSc. Hons in Business Administration from Utah Valley University and an MSc. in Accounting with a Minor in Finance from George Washington University.

External Evaluators

Will Thompson is an applied economist at IDinsight specializing in evaluation and learning for international development programs. He focuses on using practical, rigorous quantitative and mixed-methods approaches to assess agricultural and market systems interventions, with experience across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. For AgResults, Dr. Thompson supports a portfolio of evaluation activities across multiple prize competitions, including leading the mixed-methods evaluation of the Indonesia Aquaculture Challenge Project and conducting cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analyses across the portfolio. He also prepares sustainability assessments to understand whether market and firm-level changes persist after prize implementation. Dr. Thompson holds a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Georgia.

Lorraine D’Anglejan

IDinsight – Research Director

Lorraine D’Anglejan is a Director for the West and North Africa region at IDinsight, based in Rabat, Morocco. In her role in the West and North Africa team, Ms. D’Anglejan leads client engagement and oversees projects in order to drive each partnership to achieve its social impact goals. Her portfolio spans community and human development, agriculture, and gender, with a special attention to ecosystem building and supporting social businesses. Ms. D’Anglejan serves as External Evaluator Research Director for AgResults and has led evaluation activities for the Senegal Crop Storage Finance and the Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) Vaccine Challenge Projects. She also leads portfolio-level exercises such as Crowding-in Evaluation, Cost-Benefit Analysis and other sustainability assessments. Ms. D’Anglejan holds a master’s degree in Human Resources from Sciences Po Paris and a master’s degree in Economics and Public Policy from Sciences Po Paris and Ecole Polytechnique.

An initiative with a unique identity and mandate