Completion evaluation

Objectives, process and core learning partnership of the evaluation

Objectives. In 2009, the IFAD Office of Evaluation conducted a final evaluation of the Roots and Tubers Development Programme (PDRT) in Benin. In accordance with the IFAD Evaluation Policy, this had two objectives: (i) to provide a basis for assessing programme performance; and (ii) to contribute to the learning needed by programme partners with a view to preparing and implementing other rural development projects and programmes in Benin and elsewhere. The PDRT evaluation focused on four dimensions: (i) programme performance (relevance, effectiveness and efficiency); (ii) the programme's impact on rural poverty; (iii) cross-sectoral criteria (sustainability, innovation, replication and scaling up); and (iv) the performance of IFAD and its partners.

Evaluation process. PDRT was evaluated in four major stages from mid-February to mid-November 2009: (i) preparation (review of documents, preparatory mission from 24 February to 3 March and self-evaluation); (ii) the main evaluation mission from 27 April to 22 May 2009 (interviews and direct observation); (iii) analysis of information gathered and preparation of this report (including several rounds of consultation on the draft report); and (iv) finalizing the evaluation (draft agreement at completion point, and signing of the agreement by the Government and IFAD). The evaluation drew on four main sources: written sources, self-evaluations carried out by the Government (the supervising ministry) and IFAD's programme manager, interviews with programme participants and partners at all levels (the Government, the West African Development Bank (BOAD), members of the programme management unit (PMU), service providers, producers, processors, traders etc.) and direct observation. The team visited 20 villages programme intervention villages and 6 villages not covered by PDRT. Throughout the evaluation process, the evaluators maintained a frank and open dialogue with programme partners.

Core learning partnership. To formalize collaboration between the Office of Evaluation and the programme partners, a core learning partnership (CLP) was set up comprising the following members: (i) the Government of Benin (the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, the PDRT team and the Ministry of Economy and Finance); (ii) IFAD (Western and Central Africa Division, Policy and Technical Advisory Division, and Office of Evaluation); (iii) BOAD; and (iv) the managers of the Rural Development Support Programme (PADER) and the Regional Cassava Processing and Marketing Initiative (RCPMI).

Agreement at completion point. In accordance with the IFAD Evaluation Policy, this agreement at completion point was prepared, with assistance from the Office of Evaluation, by the Western and Central Africa Division and the Government of Benin. It is an action paper that presents the main evaluation findings and recommendations and outlines ways to implement the recommendations.

The main evaluation findings

PDRT was first and foremost a roots and tubers development programme focusing in particular on cassava and yam growing and processing. The programme contributed to the development of technical innovations in partnership with research institutions (improved varieties, new food by-products) and promoted the replication of several innovations in the intervention villages through an effective group-based participatory approach.

In this way the programme accelerated the dissemination of improved varieties of roots and tubers, using an effective system of multiplication for quality plant material. It also encouraged the adoption of more intensive cultivation techniques, mainly among market-oriented producers with sufficient access to land, inputs, services and markets. This has contributed to a fairly significant increase in yields: 30 per cent for cassava (versus a projected 75 per cent, in addition to 30 per cent at the national level) and 26 per cent for yam in the intervention villages (versus a projected 50 per cent, with the national level remaining virtually unchanged). The programme fostered the dissemination of improved gari [bitter cassava] in the country as a whole and of traditional cassava by-products in the northern region where they were little known prior to its inception.

PDRT encouraged the members of production and processing groups to intensify or maintain their roots and tubers activity, at a time when cassava production was decreasing and demand for roots and tubers by-products was rising nationally. The marketing infrastructure built or rehabilitated under the programme (tracks, storerooms, warehouses) contributed to moving product to market. Thus, the price increase of recent years and the relative ease in marketing led to an increase in the incomes and assets of men and women belonging to the groups.

The programme's institutional and policy contribution is the factor that helped most in ensuring the sustainability of programme results. The service providers contracted by the programme, both public (governmental technical services) and private (NGOs, consulting firms, etc.), were able to build capacity in rural outreach and advisory assistance, and the programme made a significant contribution to formulation of the national policy adopted by the Government to promote roots and tubers.

The many achievements of the programme were made possible largely by the good capacity of the PMU regarding the management of contractual partnerships. Results-based payment of service providers ensured a good quality/price ratio for the services received. The Government provided partial compensation for the loss in value of the IFAD loan as a result of the devaluation in special drawing rights as against the CFA franc. Through RCPMI, IFAD contributed to an exchange of experiences among projects carried out with its support and raised the profile of PDRT beyond Benin's borders.

However, what little impact the programme had on the incomes and food security of its target group was largely indirect. Very poor producers were underrepresented in the PDRT groups, since they had difficulty meeting the group requirements, could not take full advantage of activities and, ultimately, were unable to find solutions to their basic constraints (lack of access to land, inputs, services and markets). This "failure" of an important part of the target group is attributable to a targeting strategy that was poorly developed and poorly adapted. In addition, the target group's production objectives and specific constraints were not sufficiently taken into account in the programme design and interventions. None of the partners paid serious attention during programme design and implementation to the measures needed to ensure that its general objective was achieved and its target group reached.

Indeed, processors note a general trend toward a reduction in their profit margin as a result of the progressive fall in the price of by-products compared with the price of raw materials. The need to lease services for automated processing stages from the men who own equipment further narrows the margin for women. The very low level of equipment procurement by processor groups is attributable in part to the programme's inability to bring about any real improvement in the processors' access to medium- and long-term credit, but also to the inappropriate nature of the design and collective operation model adopted for the processing workshops. This, in combination with opaque infrastructure ownership arrangements in some places, has contributed to the abandonment of a large number of PDRT-built workshops.

The programme's impact on social capital and capacity-building was also limited. The beneficiaries participated primarily in group activities in order to gain access to programme support. The programme was unsuccessful in enabling the groups to develop into lobbying associations or service cooperatives. This failure was caused by the late start-up of efforts to encourage groups in this direction and also to the reduction in programme duration by one year as a result of the delay in its inception. As a consequence, the survival rate of grass-roots institutions is very low.

Overall, the programme had little impact on production and processing practices to promote better conservation of the environment. Consequently, the degradation of natural resources, particularly soil, continues as a result of environmentally harmful cultivation and processing practices.

The sustainability of positive changes in roots and tubers productivity and processing, and therefore household incomes, depends largely on changes in supply and demand. The extent to which the initial target group is able gradually to take advantage of these changes will be contingent upon government policies and strategies that apply to this group, an area where uncertainty remains. IFAD has however taken steps to ensure continuity in support to the roots and tubers subsector and consolidation of programme gains, by providing for resources and activities in more recent IFAD projects under way in Benin (PADER and the Rural Economic Growth Support Project [PACER]).

In conclusion, PDRT generated a substantial number of promising results in roots and tubers development. Strengths include its innovative character, participatory and practical approach, focus on rural women and impact on public and private institutions. Nevertheless, the programme contributed little to its general objective of sustainable poverty reduction among the most vulnerable households, because of a significant discrepancy between this objective and the kind of interventions promoted. The programme partners were not successful in correcting the focus once the programme had been launched. They appear to have believed that developing agricultural productivity and small-scale local processing, focused on plant species already well established locally among the various categories of producer and processed mainly by women, would automatically benefit the most disadvantaged men and women. The PDRT experience showed, however, that reaching these groups is not automatic and that unless their specific production conditions are truly taken into account within an operational and watertight targeting strategy, with specific innovative actions to develop their potential, they will miss out on most of the possible programme benefits.

At a time when the international situation and calls from IFAD's member countries are leading the Fund to refocus on agricultural development, the very important question arises of how to ensure that such agricultural development is inclusive. Neglecting the poorest productive households would seem unacceptable in the current context of Benin, where inequitable growth redistribution is considered one of the main structural causes of encroaching poverty and rural exodus. This would also be incompatible with IFAD's mandate and targeting policy.

Recommendations agreed upon by all partners

Recommendations

Recommendation 1 (IFAD, partner governments): Conduct thematic studies on: (i) roots and tubers development projects cofinanced by IFAD; and (ii) targeting strategies used in projects cofinanced by IFAD. Specifically:

• The study of roots and tubers development projects could take the form of a thematic evaluation of the performance and impact of such projects in Western and Central Africa. Such an evaluation would allow useful lessons to be drawn from the considerable experience gained in the course of IFAD-cofinanced interventions of this type, in a context in which the Fund is being led to refocus its support on agricultural development and value chains. It could be based on evaluations already carried out by the IFAD Office of Evaluation following the Root and Tuber Improvement Programme in Ghana (1999-2004), the Roots and Tubers Expansion Programme in Nigeria¹(2001-2009) and PDRT. It could be enriched further by a summary evaluation of the Roots and Tubers Improvement and Marketing Programme in Ghana (2006-2014) and the national Roots and Tubers Development Programme in Cameroon (2004-2013). This evaluation should pay particular attention to the impact that recent technological, socio-economic and institutional changes in the roots and tubers subsectors have had on living conditions for the poorest active rural populations (IFAD's target group) and on the environment.
• The study of the performance (relevance, effectiveness and efficiency) of the targeting strategies and mechanisms used in IFAD-financed interventions could take the form of either a thematic evaluation or a learning theme for the Annual Report on Results and Impact of IFAD Operations (ARRI). The analysis should particularly cover the extent to which the targeting mechanisms proposed in project and programme design (geographical targeting, self-targeting, community targeting etc.): (i) are clearly defined at the design stage and are realistic in the intervention context; (ii) are properly implemented during project execution; (iii) make it possible to actually reach the poorest and most vulnerable active rural poor people as defined in the IFAD Policy on Targeting (2006); and (iv) contribute to lowering the cost of interventions per direct beneficiary belonging to the target group.

Recommendation 2 (IFAD and Government): Innovate on approaches and technologies designed in favour of the poorest roots and tubers producers and processors, to develop their potential for contributing to agricultural and rural development, and to play a direct role in improving their living conditions. These approaches should be part of the implementation strategy for Benin's National Policy on Roots and Tubers Promotion. Specifically:

• Develop an effective approach to target the poorest roots and tubers producers and processors. The project monitoring and evaluation system should be used to ensure that the target group is actually being reached. The aim is not to exclude better-off producers and processors from the project benefits, but to ensure that the poorest have priority in accessing such benefits and can take full advantage of them. In this regard, the most effective targeting strategy probably remains self-targeting (given the nature of support), but the choice of the types of support to be provided should be based on an in-depth understanding of the specific constraints facing the poorest producers and processors.
• Actively combine support for production and processing within each of the disadvantaged households, which will entail working simultaneously with the men and women from the same household. The advantages of this approach are that: (i) the household retains all the value added during production and processing, regardless of fluctuations in the prices of raw materials as against by-products; and (ii) the household is less vulnerable to price fluctuations because it can choose the time of sale for its products (because they have been processed, they can be kept longer).
• Develop and promote specific ways of ensuring secure access to land for the targeted producers (those with very little land), to enable them to invest in soil fertility without the risk that they will suddenly lose their land.
• Promote private services that are accessible to the poorest producers and processors, such as the supply of inputs (plant material, fertilizer etc.) and access to credit, which are essential for intensification of roots and tubers production.
• Establish processing workshops for disadvantaged women, which would be collectively owned but individually used, and technically designed to optimize labour productivity and respect both women processors' working conditions and the environment. These could be modelled on the private workshops that have been developed without significant external support.
• Facilitate market access for the poorest, for example by organizing small-scale producers and processors into marketing associations equipped with storehouses in proximity to markets, support the establishment of a (private) demand and price information network, and develop relationships with the various actors in roots and tubers value chains so that ways of lowering transaction costs can be jointly sought.
• Combine the data generated by the market price collection and monitoring system coordinated by the National Food Security Support Office with those coming from the production and productivity monitoring system piloted by the Roots and Tubers Information System, in order to carry out prospective analysis on changes in supply and demand for roots and tubers products. Such analysis should then be used by public-sector technical services to advise roots and tubers producers and processors on market prospects, not to push them towards speculation but to sensitize them to trends and risks relating to changes in markets and prices.
• Help rural men and women working in the subsector to organize to defend their interests, in order to obtain better working conditions (proper pay, working hours, safety and hygiene, job security etc.). This would be a new area of intervention for IFAD in Africa.

Recommendation 3 (Government, IFAD-financed projects): Ensure the sustainability of results and scaling up of innovations promoted by PDRT. This could be done in the framework of ongoing and future IFAD-financed projects, following the programme approach initiated under PADER.

Specifically:

• Strengthen and rationalize the production chain for plant material of improved varieties and expand it to other roots and tubers.
• Continue to disseminate sustainable production technologies for roots and tubers (technical fiches in local languages, group training, demonstrations, radio broadcasts etc.).
• Improve quality management and marketing organization for cassava flour. To this end, greater stress needs to be placed on setting up production units based on the ALITECH model, i.e. small or medium enterprises equipped with minimum equipment, such as a grater, press and gas dryer or solar tents. Such units exist in Ghana and produce high-quality cassava flour.
• Continue to work on developing quality standards for roots and tubers products and put in place a quality control system and a product traceability and certification system.
• Encourage producer and processor groups to evolve towards service cooperatives, on the basis of their members' objectives (in order to facilitate access to inputs, information, credit, markets etc.) or lobbying associations (in order to strengthen their members' bargaining power vis-à-vis public and private service providers). In the long term, if the need is felt within these grass-roots organizations, help them to form federations; and
  Replicate the results-based payment model for public and private service providers in the context of other IFAD-financed projects.

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1/ Within the framework of the Nigeria country programme evaluation.