Data is at the core of everything we do.
Impact we measure: We measure how our seeds affect farmers’ incomes, climate resilience, and the amount of additional nutrition in the maize they consume and sell to others.
Third-party studies: We estimate our impact by correlating these numbers with randomized controlled trials and other studies that we’ve supported or already existed.
Cost-effectiveness: We pull all of these numbers together to estimate how cost-effective our program is. We think if the people you’re trying to help would get more benefit from your NGO being canceled and the budget just donated to them, you should probably just do that.
In-depth reviews of our data are available in our annual reports. We provide data sets upon request, and we’re working to upload our data sets, protocols, and tools to the Harvard Dataverse.
IMPACT SUMMARY
What we measure
Our internal M&E systems gather annual data on our reach, farmer yields, incomes, sales and consumption trends to determine how much biofortified maize our farmers produce and to estimate how its nutritious grain spreads through national markets. We also monitor our maize’s nutritional content to calculate additional quantities of nutrients entering diets as a result of consuming biofortified maize. Our M&E methodology relies on two tools:
Annual Farmer Surveys
We collect contact information for farmers planting biofortified seed from retailers and donation programs and conduct annual surveys with nationally representative samples of over 500 farmers. With data from these surveys, we can estimate:
- How many farmer families we reach, based on the average purchase/donation size and seed sharing with family and neighbors,
- How much biofortified maize they consume at the household level,
- How much maize reaches markets through sales, and the average price farmers get for their grain.
Side-by-side parcels
Seed genetics is only one of many factors that affect yields. To generate data that isolates the effect of seed genetics and allows us to test for statistical significance, we get ~100 farmers to plant biofortified and conventional maize on side-by-side parcels and apply the same management to both. This methodology allows us to gather accurate measurements on:
- Yields and incomes, by comparing production costs and total output, and calculating revenue and net profit for farmers,
- Climate resilience, by measuring crop damage on parcels affected by droughts, storms, pests, and diseases,
- Nutrition, by collecting grain samples from each parcel and analyzing them in our in-house laboratory for iron, zinc, and protein quality.
THIRd-party studies
We would love to directly measure how eating our maize impacts children’s growth. However, the determinants of height include environmental, socioeconomic, and nutritional factors, and isolating the effect of biofortified maize would mean following thousands of children in participating and comparison communities over several years, at a cost of millions of dollars.
Instead, we rely on already existing studies and randomized controlled trials that show the nutrition and health impacts of biofortified maize. Where additional studies are needed, we fund and support them.
Already existing studies:
- Gunaratna et al., 2008: Meta-analyses show quality protein maize improves the rate of child growth in height and weight.
- Chomba et al., 2015: Zinc from biofortified maize is as absorbable as zinc from fortified flour.
- INCAP, 2021: Diet recalls indicate that farming households consuming biofortified maize meet most of their daily zinc requirements.
- Cornell & INCAP, 2022-2023: High-zinc maize improved zinc biomarkers in women and children compared to conventional maize. (To be submitted for peer-review in Feb, 2026)
- CU Denver & INCAP, 2024-5 (in progress): An RCT on bioavailability with UC Denver is assessing how tortillas made from biofortified maize affect zinc and iron absorption in Guatemalan children.
Cost-effectiveness
We built cost-effectiveness models that compare our costs to the estimated benefits of our work: higher incomes for farmers who grow our maize and better health and nutrition for families who eat biofortified maize. Our full models are public, so anyone can review our methods, data sources, and assumptions.
As we collect new data, refine our projections, or update our methods, we periodically release updated models. Changes are documented in a changelog included in each model.
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