A two-man review team composed of Julian Gonsalves (India) and Oumar Niangado (Mali) are in the process of undertaking an internally commissioned review of GFAR's Global Partnership Programme (GPP) mechanism for promoting and learning about building multi-stakeholder partnerships. The team initially spent time with GFAR Secretariat personnel to plan the information gathering phase of the evaluation. Subsequently, an e-mail survey was conducted among different stakeholder groups to ascertain their opinions as to the effectiveness of the GPP mechanism for achieving GFAR's objectives and also with respect to the impact that novel partnership arrangements are having on achieving over-arching agricultural research for development goals. There has also been an opportunity to interview some of these stakeholders personally.

Field visits were undertaken to three countries (Nepal, Uganda and Cambodia) where one of the global partnership programmes - Promoting Local Innovation in Ecologically-oriented Natural Resource Management, PROLINNOVA - has on-the-ground activities. This provided the team with an insight about how individual GPP can operate successfully at different hierarchical levels, from local through to global.

At the end of January, 20 GPP practitioners and resource persons came together with the review team in a 3-day 'learning and review workshop' to share experiences in the identification, design and implementation of GPPs to-date. The workshop reviewed the definition and the principles that guide GPPs, how they are governed, and the process for their formulation and approval. Workshop participants also examined how best to monitor and evaluate the process so as to be of maximum benefit in terms of learning about multi-stakeholder partnership arrangements and for improving the effectiveness of ARD projects and programmes in meeting their goals.

The report of the review team will be examined by the GFAR Steering Committee when it meets in Sana'a, Yemen at the end of June.