EVALUATION PURPOSE AND SCOPE

1. At the request of the Executive Board of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Office of Evaluation and Studies (OE) has carried out a series of Country Portfolio Evaluations (CPE) for Yemen, Sudan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

2. Honduras has been selected as the first Latin American country in which IFAD should analysed and synthesised its experience. This choice was made taking into account the importance of rural poverty in Honduras and the relevance of IFAD's experience in the country for the rest of Central America, where IFAD has been financing 12 projects.

3. The purpose of the Honduras ECP is to draw lessons from the experience in order to improve future project design and implementation. An attempt has been made to consider the experience of other funding agencies and to provide elements for a policy dialogue with the Government of Honduras (GOH) concerning policies, programmes and projects for rural poverty alleviation.

4. To this effect, the CPE focused on the following issues:

(a) Which strategy (or strategies) IFAD has developed in Honduras and to what extent the implementation of IFAD- financed projects have taken into account the needs and possibilities of target beneficiaries?

(b) What results have been achieved, and what limitations have been faced, by these projects? How sustainable are these results? To what extent the projects (or some of their elements) are replicable?

(c) How could future design and implementation of ongoing projects be financed on the basis of lessons learned from IFAD's experience in the country?

(d) Which lessons learned from IFAD's experience in Honduras could be applied in principle to the rest of Central America?

5. The main report consists of five chapters complemented by eight annexes (which present in detail those aspects synthesised in the main report). The first chapter presents the national and regional context in which the projects have been designed and implemented.

6. The second chapter presents the experience of the projects cofinanced by IFAD. The projects' results and a discussion of their sustainability are the subject matter of chapter three, whereas chapter four includes lessons learned from experience and a set of recommendations for the ongoing projects.

7. The Annexes contain a detailed presentation of the following themes: peasants organisation and participation, the economic framework, hillside agriculture and environmental protection, rural roads and construction, support to rural women and incorporation of gender aspects in the projects, project management and organisation, credit and financial services. These annexes are the basis on which the CPE's main report was prepared.