The main purpose of this exercise is to produce an independent assessment of the past and current support of the EU in food and nutrition security, sustainable agriculture and fisheries at country, regional and global levels. The evaluation aims more specifically at:

• Informing strategic decisions on the implementation and future mid-term review of the new Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF);
• Improving cooperation with EU partners under the new MFF and in the light of the new EU Sustainable Agri-Food Systems (SAFS) approach;
• Nurturing the design of new interventions in support of Agri-Food Systems transformations;
• Guiding choices for scaling up and replicating innovative/pilot approaches.

The evaluation covers non-spending (e.g., policy dialogue and advocacy) and spending activities funded under geographic (DCI Latin America, DCI Asia, EDF for Africa and Pacific and Caribbean) and thematic financing instruments (DCI-FOOD, DCI-ENV/DCI-GPGC, etc). The analysis considers interventions financed through other thematic budget lines such as the DCI-CSO&LA, and the Trust funds (e.g. the EU Trust Fund for Africa, Trust Fund Bêkou, Trust Fund for Colombia).
The temporal scope focuses on the MFF 2014-2020 and considers any major developments that occurred in 2021.
The geographical scope of the evaluation is essentially worldwide, but in practice will focus on 59 partner countries for which food and nutrition security or sustainable agriculture have been a priority sector in the previous MFF (2014-2020). A thorough selection of case studies identified a representative and evaluable sample of countries: Niger, Kenya, Malawi, Colombia, Haiti and Cambodia.
Following the 2020 4th Biennial Report and the 2019 EU Achievements Report, four EU priorities for addressing the challenges of food and nutrition security, as well as sustainable agriculture, are at the heart of the evaluation:

• Enhancing the resilience of the most vulnerable to food crises;
• Fostering specific nutrition outcomes;
• Increasing responsible investments in agriculture and food systems;
• Stimulating innovations for sustainable agri-food systems.