Laurenz Langer

What are the impacts of urban agriculture programs on food security in low and middle-income countries?

BackgroundIssues of food security and nutrition have wide reaching implications for people and their environments, particularly in low and middle-income countries. One proposed solution is urban agriculture, which has been widely upheld as a solution to the food-crisis facing increasingly metropolitan populations. It is believed to provide the urban poor with food and a source of potential income, whilst improving the urban environment and reducing pressure on finite farmland. Although it faded from many development agendas in the 1990’s, urban agriculture has seen a resurgence since a peak in global food prices in the late 2000’s. There are, however, potential disadvantages to this increasing drive for urban agriculture including associated urban health risks and implications for the environment. The usage of waste-water, for example, may contaminate produced food and intensive irrigation might lead to the spread of malaria and water borne diseases, as well as threatening already limited water supplies. Soil erosion and the intensive use of fertilizers and pesticides might also present health risks to urban populations and damage the environment. Despite the potential benefits and harms of urban agriculture, the evidence-base is not well understood. Given the current policy drive to promote urban agriculture, there is an urgent need to understand its effects on urban populations and their environments.Methods/designThis review will seek out, select, appraise and synthesise evidence on the impacts of urban agriculture on food security and nutrition. We will employ systematic review methodology to ensure that our review of the evidence is comprehensive, transparent and replicable. In addition to searching electronic databases, we will examine websites and contact academics, practitioners and policy-makers for relevant research. All potentially relevant literature will be screened against pre-specified criteria and assessed for risk of bias using established critical appraisal tools. This is to ensure that we only include the evidence in which we have confidence. Depending on the nature of the available data, we will then synthesise the available evidence using statistical meta-analysis and/or narrative synthesis. Our findings will be disseminated in a variety of ways to ensure that the evidence is available for policy-makers and practitioners.

The size and nature of the evidence-base for smallholder farming in Africa: a systematic map

Relevant systematic reviews and impact evaluations were systematically sought and described in order to assess the size and nature of the evidence-base about the effectiveness of interventions for smallholder farmers in Africa. A total of 21 relevant systematic reviews and 415 reports of impact evaluations were identified. This paper describes this African evidence-base in terms of the interventions and outcomes assessed, and the geographical spread of the primary research across the continent. Gaps in the evidence-base are identified and recommendations made for future research.

What have we learned from the application of systematic review methodology in international development? – a thematic overview

The importance of systematic review evidence in the design and implementation of policies and interventions is increasingly recognised in the field of international development. This article presents a stocktake of the primary years of systematic reviewing in international development, providing a thematic overview of what we have learned about conducting international development reviews. Applying a structured methodology to search for and categorise all relevant literature, it establishes that systematic reviews have been well received in international development and serve as a useful tool for evidence-informed development, which has led to important discoveries in the domain.

Sport for development – a systematic map of evidence from Africa

ABSTRACT This article presents a systematic map of the evidence on sport-for-developments effectiveness in Africa. Applying systematic review methodology, it identifies all rigorous evidence that evaluates African sport-for-development interventions. These impact evaluations are then mapped to provide a systematic and comprehensive examination of sport-for-developments evidence-base. This contributes the first systematic engagement with sport-for-developments evidence-base in Africa and the systematic map finds that there is currently no available evidence that supports or refutes the assumption that sport can positively influence development outcomes. It cautions against the continued rhetoric and promotion of sport-for-development as an effective approach to poverty reduction and international development.

Can mobile health training meet the challenge of ‘measuring better’?

ABSTRACT Mobile learning has seen a large uptake in use in low- and middle-income countries. This is driven by rhetorics of easy scaling, reaching the hard-to-reach and the potential for generating analytics from the applications used by learners. Healthcare training has seen a proliferation of apps aimed at improving accountability through tracking and measuring workplace learning. A view of the mobile phone as an agent of change is thus linked with a technocentric approach to measurement. Metrics, initially created as proxies for what gets done by health workers, are now shaping the practices they were intended to describe. In this paper, we show how, despite some valiant efforts, ‘measuring better’ remains difficult to achieve due to entrenched views of what measurement consists of. We analyse a mobile health (mHealth) classification framework, drawing out some implications of how it has been used in training health workers. These lead us to recommend moving away from a view of mobile learning linked tightly to accountability and numbers. We suggest a focus on an alternative future, where ‘measuring better’ is promoted as part of socio-cultural views of learning and linked with a social justice conceptualisation of development.

How stakeholder engagement has led us to reconsider definitions of rigour in systematic reviews

As a methodology designed to inform policy and practice decisions, it is particularly important to ensure that systematic reviews are shaped by those who will use them. There is a broad range of approaches for engagement of the potential users of reviews that aim to elicit their priorities and needs and incorporate these into the review design. This incorporation of their priorities and needs can create a tension between their calls for locally-specific, often rapidly-produced evidence syntheses for policy needs and the production of unbiased, generalisable, globally-relevant systematic reviews. This tension raises the question of what is a ‘gold standard’ review. This commentary aims to address head on this often undiscussed key challenge with regard to stakeholder involvement in systematic reviews: that responding to stakeholders can mean reconsidering what makes a review rigorous. The commentary proposes a new model to address these tensions that combines the production of public-good reviews, with stakeholder-driven syntheses. In this, it presents the approach taken by our team at the Africa Centre for Evidence at the University of Johannesburg to achieve two different but complementary outputs: (i) ‘public goods’, namely comprehensive and generalisable systematic reviews of the evidence available for and accessible to a global audience, and (ii) locally-focussed, stakeholder-driven, pragmatically-produced syntheses for decision-making at a policy level. The designed approach incorporates balancing the formal requirements of full, published systematic reviews with engagement of national and international decision-makers. It also accommodates space to move from stakeholder engagement to co-production, where stakeholders are engaged to such an extent that they become partners in the production of the review. These approaches are integrated into the traditional steps for producing a systematic review with implications as to what constitutes a gold standard approach to synthesising evidence.

What are the impacts of urban agriculture programs on food security in low and middle-income countries: a systematic review

BackgroundUrban Agriculture is considered to contribute to improved food security among the income poor in urban contexts across developing countries. Much literature exists on the topic assuming a positive relationship. The aim of this review was to collect and analyse available evidence on the impact of urban agriculture in low and middle-income countries.MethodsWe employed systematic review methods to identify all relevant and reliable research on UA’s impact on food security and nutrition. Only impact evaluations that set out to measure the effectiveness of UA interventions on food security, as compared to the effects of not engaging in UA, qualified for inclusion. Studies had to have a comparison group and at least two data points.ResultsSystematic searches resulted in 8142 hits, and screening of abstracts resulted in 198 full texts identified. No studies met the review’s inclusion criteria. Therefore, the review found no available evidence that supports or refutes the suggestion that urban agriculture positively impacts on individual or household food security in low and middle-income countries. The largest proportion of studies at full text stage was excluded based on study design, as they were not impact evaluations, i.e. they did not have a comparison group and at least data points. Two observations were made: Firstly, searches yielded a range of studies that consider associations between UA and certain aspects of food security. Secondly, there is a large pool of cross-sectional studies on UA’s potential to contribute to increased food security, particularly from west and east Africa.ConclusionsThe research currently available does not allow for any conclusions to be made on whether or not urban agriculture initiatives contribute to food security. The fact that impact evaluations are absent from the current evidence-base calls for increased efforts to measure the impact of urban agriculture on food security in low and middle-income countries through rigorous impact evaluations. With regard to systematic review methodology, this review alludes to the value of compiling a systematic map prior to engaging in a full systematic review.

Walking the last mile on the long road to evidence-informed development: building capacity to use research evidence

The systematic application of rigorous evidence to inform the design and implementation of development policies and programmes has the potential to positively influence development outcomes. To achieve such evidence-informed development, a process of generating, transmitting, and using high-quality, policy-relevant evidence of development effectiveness is required. This article focuses on the final step in this casual chain – the use of evidence by national development policymakers. It proposes a people- and demand-focused approach to capacity building for the use of research evidence by policymakers. This support in building personal as well as team capacity and demand is assumed to encourage a growing institutionalisation of evidence use. The article integrates these capacity-building efforts into the wider theory of change for evidence-informed development, highlighting the importance of effective mechanisms to encourage research use in order to achieve the objective of improving lives through research evidence.

Making the Most of What We Already Know: A Three-Stage Approach to Systematic Reviewing

Background: Conducting a systematic review in social policy is a resource-intensive process in terms of time and funds. It is thus important to understand the scope of the evidence base of a topic area prior to conducting a synthesis of primary research in order to maximize these resources. One approach to conserving resources is to map out the available evidence prior to undertaking a traditional synthesis. A few examples of this approach exist in the form of gap maps, overviews of reviews, and systematic maps supported by social policy and systematic review agencies alike. Despite this growing call for alternative approaches to systematic reviews, it is still common for systematic review teams to embark on a traditional in-depth review only. Objectives: This article describes a three-stage approach to systematic reviewing that was applied to a systematic review focusing in interventions for smallholder farmers in Africa. We argue that this approach proved useful in helping us to understand the evidence base. Results: By applying preliminary steps as part of a three-stage approach, we were able to maximize the resources needed to conduct a traditional systematic review on a more focused research question. This enabled us to identify and fill real knowledge gaps, build on work that had already been done, and avoid wasting resources on areas of work that would have no useful outcome. It also facilitated meaningful engagement between the review team and our key policy stakeholders.

Mobile Learning for Development: Ready to Randomise?

Driven by the demand for evidence of development effectiveness, the field of mobile learning for development (ML4D) has recently begun to adopt rigorous evaluation methods. Using the findings of an ongoing systematic review of ML4D interventions, this paper critically assesses the value proposition of rigorous impact evaluations in ML4D. While a drive towards more reliable evidence of mobile learning’s effectiveness as a development intervention is welcome, the maturity of the field, which continues to be characterised by pilot programmes rather than well-established and self-sustaining interventions, questions the utility of rigorous evaluation designs. The experiences of conducting rigorous evaluations of ML4D interventions have been mixed, and the paper concludes that in many cases the absence of an explicit programme theory negates the effectiveness of carefully designed impact evaluations. Mixed-methods evaluations are presented as a more relevant evaluation approach in the context of ML4D.