Assessing research impact on poverty: the importance of farmers’ perspectives P. Kristjanson a, *,F.Place b ,S.Franzel b , P.K. Thornton a a International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), PO Box 30709, Nairobi, Kenya b International Centre for Research on Agroforestry (ICRAF), PO Box 30677, Nairobi, Kenya Received 29 June 2000; received in revised form 30 November 2000; accepted 28 March 2001 Abstract In this paper we provide evidence to show that farmers’ perspectives on poverty processes and outcomes are critical in the early stages of evaluating impact of agricultural research on poverty.Wesummarizelessonslearnedfromfarmerimpactassessmentworkshopsheldinfive African locations, covering three agro-ecological zones and five different agroforestry and livestock technologies arising from collaborative national–international agricultural research. Poverty alleviation is a process that needs to be understood before impact can be measured. Workshops such as those we describe can help researchers to identify farmers’ different ways of managing and using a technology and likely effects, unanticipated impacts, major impacts to pursue in more quantitative studies, the primary links between agricultural technology and poverty, and key conditioning factors affecting adoption and impact that can be used to stratify samples in more formal analyses. Farmer workshops inform other qualitative and quantitative impact assessment methods. We discuss the linkage of farmer-derived informa- tion with GIS-based approaches that allow more complete specification of recommendation domains and broader-scale measurement of impact. # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Impact; Poverty; Agricultural technology; Agricultural research 0308-521X/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0308-521X(01)00068-3 Agricultural Systems 72 (2002) 73–92 www.elsevier.com/locate/agsy * Corresponding author. Tel.: +254-2-630-743; fax: +254-2-631-499. E-mail address: p.kristjanson@cgiar.org (P. Kristjanson).