Planning and Corporate Services

CTA established this department to improve the quality, efficiency and consistency of its operational programmes. The department is responsible for:

• identifying emerging issues and trends in the agricultural development environment and recommending appropriate CTA projects and services;
• preparing guidelines for planning, managing and monitoring CTA’s activities;
• submitting proposals for improving the coordination, integration and consistency of CTA’s activities;
• coordinating cooperation with other organisations in ACP and EU countries;
• preparing and supervising programme evaluations;
• coordinating and managing CTA’s computer systems, networks and databases.

In keeping with the orientations of CTA’s new strategic plan 2007 – 2010 to increase efficiency and sustainability while expanding outreach and access to information, the Planning and Corporate Services Department has further honed its programme to meet these challenges. The programme now focuses on three main areas of support, namely:

• Socio-economic analysis and awareness raising;
• Needs assessment, priority-setting, monitoring and evaluation;
• Internal information technology (IT) systems.

Socio-economic analysis and awareness-raising

Through collaborative ventures, workshops and commissioned studies, P&CS works with other institutions and external consultants to obtain and share socio-economic information. This information is used to provide technical support to the programmes undertaken by CTA and its collaborating partners.

Focal areas include:

• Agricultural trade
• market access;
• International agricultural trade negotiations (EPAs and WTO) ;
• National and regional agricultural trade policies and networks;
• Product diversification, value adding, market differentiation;
• Market access and Food safety issues (SPS);
• Agricultural Marketing, Market Information System (MIS) and Commodity Exchange;
• Cross-cutting and other thematic areas – such as gender, youth, HIV/AIDS and information and communication ( ICM) concepts and practice;
• ICT Observatory – makes the link between ICTs and agriculture and rural development;
• GenARDIS– an inter-agency programme on gender and ICT policies

P&CS also organizes internal seminars to keep CTA staff and other invitees abreast of development issues and trends, so that these can be incorporated into project identification and planning, where appropriate. It also seeks to raise awareness externally, among CTA's partners and collaborating institutions, of topics of current interest to the development community.

Needs assessment, priority-setting, monitoring and evaluation

P&CS provides a consistent and efficient approach to project cycle management, with assistance in project identification, needs assessment, priority setting, monitoring and evaluation.

Needs assessments and priority setting

Various evaluations, needs-assessment studies and priority-setting exercises, conducted over the past two decades have confirmed that CTA’s products and services are effective and relevant to the agricultural and rural development objectives of ACP countries. These reports however, recommend improvements to CTA’s efficiency and the sustainability of its activities.

Consequently, needs assessments, priority setting exercises and independent evaluations of CTA’s products and services have become common practice in CTA’s way of working, in an effort to remain relevant and focused on the needs of the beneficiaries the Centre is mandated to serve. The most recent series of studies in all three areas have been on-going since 2003:

• 2003 and 2006 - needs assessment studies for the Caribbean, Pacific and 6 post-conflict countries in Africa;
• 2007/8 - all remaining countries in Southern, West Africa, Central and East Africa will be covered.

These results have been used as input into the Centre’s 2007-2010 Strategic Plan and annual programme implementation.

Monitoring and evaluation

There are three components to the Department’s work:

• organising evaluations of CTA programmes and projects, and monitoring the follow-up to these studies to see if the lessons were learnt and recommendations acted upon;
• collaborating with other institutions and external development consultants to develop approaches for evaluating the performance and impact of information-related programmes and projects;
• monitoring operational activities and developing appropriate internal guidelines and procedures.

The work on developing evaluation approaches is translated into publications, such as:

• Evaluating Information: A Letter to a Project Manager;
• SMART Toolkit for evaluating information products and services;
• Perceptions and Practice – An Anthology of Impact Assessment Experience.

Developing internal IT systems and networks

CTA's 2007-2010 strategic plan recognises the need to improve the Centre's IT capacity through various mechanisms including: (i) improving and maintaining the local area network, (ii) integrating different components of the management information system, and (iii) improving the IT skills of staff.

Integrating CTA's project management databases, maintaining the Centre's intranet and providing support services for staff to ensure that they make optimum use of the available ICT facilities are also key to improving the Centre’s efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery. The Department has also launched a series of IT ‘Tips & Tricks’ sessions aimed at informing staff of basic aspects of computer and network security.