Monitoring and Evaluation Overview

The JIFSAN Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) program is designed to capture the impact of capacity building efforts.

History of M&E

  • In 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act was signed into law to improve the safety of food produced in the US, as well as imported from other countries.
  • Per the requirement of FSMA, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) developed a comprehensive international food safety capacity building plan, which includes measuring the impact of food safety capacity building efforts.
  • In 2012, FDA asked JIFSAN to develop a Monitoring and Evaluation (Metrics) program to capture the impact of JIFSAN’s trainings.
  • In 2020, JIFSAN began doing metrics on JIFSAN and Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) Produce Safety Rule train-the-trainers (TTT) and grower trainings (GT)

Monitoring and Impact Evaluation

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What are the impacts of JIFSAN training? The chain from Training to Welfare.

  • JIFSAN’s International training emphasizes the importance of the train-the-trainer approach, i.e., instead of training international food safety professionals directly, help other countries to develop their own food safety training capacity through one-off trainings, internship programs, as well as collaboration with foreign food safety agencies and industry organizations.
  • Food safety trainings are expected to help agriculture and food industry value chain actors to obtain up-to-date knowledge and skills and improve their attitude towards adopting scientific methods and technologies for food safety.
  • When agriculture and food industry value chain actors change their behaviors, they will be able to supply safer food to consumers at home and in the US.
  • Safer food improves consumer nutrition and health. Better product improves value chain actors’ income and livelihood.

To capture the impacts of JIFSAN’s training, we want to measure the changes along the chain.
  • To monitor JIFSAN’s TTT trainings, we want to measure the scale of our effort such as the number of trainings, the number of participants, and the span of geographic location (see map). In addition, we would like to measure their improvement as a result of the training. JIFSAN obtains this information through training documentation and in-class evaluation.
  • To measure the immediate impact of the TTT training, we would like to know how many of our international participants become food safety trainers and the scales of their training efforts. We measure this “multiplier effect” by the number of growers trained by JIFSAN TTT participants. JIFSAN acquires this information by contacting our past participants.
  • However, the impacts on agriculture and food industry value chain actors, their outputs, and welfare of the society are captured by other organizations in both the public and private sectors.
  • Just as food safety improvement is a collaborative effort, so is the M&E of food safety capacity building.  JIFSAN proposes a data-sharing public private partnership. For more related information please also visit IAFNS' Capacity Building page .

Importance of M&E
Monitoring and evaluation is more than meeting requirements of FSMA and FDA. It is an integral and important component of food safety capacity building effort. The program can

  • Document and demonstrate our past training efforts
  • Justify and galvanize future investments in food safety capacity building
  • Examine our past performance and identify paths of improvements

JIFSAN’s M&E Approach

Our Approach M&E Activities

Step 1: In-class evaluation

  • Before- and After-training knowledge tests
  • Questionnaires for participant feedback
  • Documentation of training
  • In-class or Qualtrics evaluation summary and reports
  • Research based on in-class or Qualtrics evaluation

Step 2: Follow-up correspondence

  • Inquire about participants’ experience as trainers
  • Collect feedback after they applied training knowledge on the job
  • Collecting training records internationally
    • Collaborative Training Initiatives
    • Produce Safety Rule-Train the trainer under FSMA (PSR-TTT)
    • Produce Safety Rule-grower training under FSMA (PSR-GT)
    • FAST (Produce Safety Rule under FSMA)
    • Follow-up survey for PSR-TTT

Step 3: Research based on secondary data

Step 4: Field Experiments
  • Measuring the impact of exposure of growers (i.e., owners and managers, supervisors, and workers) to PSR supplemental materials in Mexico, Chile, and Costa Rica. This is a collaborative project with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and more information is presented here.