IFAD's assistance to Morocco. Since 1979, IFAD has financed nine projects in Morocco for a total of US$146.3 million in loans on intermediate terms. The total cost of projects cofinanced by IFAD in Morocco is more than US$1.42 billion. Apart from loan programmes, Morocco has also benefited from regional technical assistance grants for an estimated total of about US$5 million.

Evaluation objectives and methodology. The country programme evaluation had two main objectives: (a) to appraise the performance and impact of IFAD's operations in Morocco and (b) to draw up a series of conclusions and recommendations that would provide the basis for the new strategic document (COSOP) for Morocco, to be produced by IFAD's Regional Division for the Near East and North Africa after the evaluation is complete. According to IFAD's methodology, a country programme evaluation addresses three main issues: (a) the quality of the strategy, (b) the effective implementation of the strategy and the performance of operations, and (c) the results and impact of IFAD's strategy and operations both for the beneficiaries and for the country. The present evaluation focused on the period between 1999 and 2006, but also took into consideration certain operations financed by IFAD prior to 1999 in order to allow comparison with more recent interventions.

The evaluation is based on: (i) an in-depth analysis of the existing documentation; (ii) a review of two available evaluations (the Livestock and Pastoral Development Project in the Eastern Region – Phase I [PDPEO I] and the Tafilalet and Dadès Rural Development Project [PDRT]) carried out by IFAD's Office of Evaluation; (iii) analysis of the primary data provided by two socio-economic surveys carried out by the Office of Evaluation in September 2006 on a sample of 253 households (133 households benefiting from projects and 120 control households) in the zones covered by two projects (the Rural Development Project for Taourirt-Taforalt [PDRTT] and the Rural Development Project in the Mountain Zones of Al-Haouz Province [PDRZMH]); (iv) the results of visits and interviews carried out by an interdisciplinary evaluation mission to Morocco from 29 October to 1 December 2006; and (v) discussions with staff from the Government of Morocco's agencies and IFAD.

The economy and the poverty situation. Morocco is a North African country with an area of 710,850 km2 and a population estimated at 29.9 million in 2004, 43 per cent living in the countryside. The country's climate varies markedly from one region to another and is as a whole affected by climatic fluctuations. The Moroccan economy has experienced a fresh surge of growth in its gross domestic product (GDP), with an average annual growth rate of 4.8 per cent between 2001 and 2004, as compared with 2.2 per cent in the previous ten years. Nevertheless, this growth is still fairly unstable and is insufficient to create jobs and reduce poverty to any significant extent. With an annual per capita income of US$1,700, Morocco falls into the category of intermediate-income countries. However, the social indicators are still a cause for concern, especially in rural areas, and are reflected in a fairly low level of human development: in 2003 Morocco was 124th of the 177 countries classified according to the human development index (HDI).

Although the 1980s saw a substantial reduction in poverty, the 1990s saw a significant increase. Thus, the poverty rate raised from 13.1 per cent in 1990 to 16.5 per cent in 1994, falling again to 14.2 per cent in 2004, meaning that nearly 4 million people were living below the poverty threshold. Poverty remains a mainly rural phenomenon, so that one Moroccan out of four in rural areas is poor, as against one out of ten in urban areas. Inequalities between men and women are still considerable, especially in rural areas, and fewer girls than boys attend school. Despite the improvement in certain indicators, Morocco thus has to meet a number of challenges if it is to achieve the millennium development goals, which have the overall aim of reducing poverty.

Poverty reduction. It was not until the early 1990s that the Moroccan Government explicitly recognized the existence and extent of the phenomenon of poverty and social exclusion. Poverty reduction initiatives undertaken by the State after the country's independence focused on short-term curative and emergency programmes (national support services, national promotion, compensation fund, school canteens etc.) as well as longer-term actions linked to economic and social development policy. In view of the unimpressive results of these interventions, specific poverty reduction policies have appeared in the past ten years, including (i) the creation of the Social Development Agency in 1999, (ii) the drawing up of a communal poverty map in 2004, (iii) the creation of the Mohammed V Foundation in 1998, (iv) the creation of the Hassan II Fund for Social and Economic Development in 2000, (v) the promulgation of a law on microfinance in 1999 and (vi) the launching of the National Human Development Initiative in May 2005. Many donors (the European Union, the World Bank, the African Development Bank [AfDB], the Islamic Development Bank [IsDB], bilateral cooperation agencies etc.) have contributed to Morocco's poverty reduction efforts. In this context, IFAD's contribution is fairly modest in terms of the volume of funding (4 per cent of the State budget allocated to the agricultural sector), but fairly specific in terms of intervention approaches and targeting.

IFAD strategy

A country strategic opportunities paper (COSOP) was produced for Morocco in 1999. Drawn up on the basis of the old guidelines, the Morocco COSOP aims at improving the living conditions of the rural poor. It focuses IFAD's assistance to the Moroccan Government on four priority goals: (i) to meet the needs expressed by rural communities with regard to agricultural development and improvements in living conditions; (ii) to promote food security at both the national and household levels; (iii) to continue and step up decentralized and devolved planning and execution; and (iv) to improve the access of poor rural households to productive resources. With regard to geographical targeting, the COSOP identifies three priority zones: mountainous areas, steppe rangelands and arid southern areas. In institutional terms, the COSOP stresses the development and boosting of the capacities of rural grass-roots organizations and project executing agencies.

The COSOP is clear in its analysis of the situation and definition of overall objectives, stressing the importance of meeting the needs expressed by rural communities with regard to agricultural development and improvements in living conditions in disadvantaged zones. IFAD deserves credit for this concern, for the Fund has often been the only body intervening in certain isolated areas of the country (mountainous or steppe zones). However, certain shortcomings will be noted in the analysis of the political, social and economic context, which prevented a clear identification of the dynamics at work and the real challenges facing Morocco. Moreover, partly because of the guidelines then in force, the COSOP document barely addresses such key issues as coordination, the piloting of interventions and the evaluation of their impact. Nor was it updated to take account of changes occurring in the country's social, political and economic context.

Performance and results

Relevance. The objectives of operations have generally been in line with the Government's policies and strategies and also with IFAD's guidelines. The Fund's projects fit in with the changing approaches advocated by the strategies of the country, IFAD and other donors, shifting from participation in the sense of awareness-raising and consultation to participation in the sense of negotiation for planning, cost-sharing and contractualization for the implementation and management of physical outputs. The douar development approach adopted by the PDRZMH and the Rural Development Project in the Eastern Middle Atlas Mountains (PDRMO) entails targeting a whole douar, planning interventions through consultation with the local population and drawing up a community development plan. This approach is an innovation introduced by IFAD, helping to concentrate interventions in geographical terms and representing a community involvement model.

While project objectives and approaches, and also the intervention subsectors themselves, are relevant and consistent with the strategic guidelines of the various partners, difficulties arise in terms of the practical approaches adopted in setting up interventions. The main weaknesses concern (i) the sustainability of interventions, (ii) optimization of production (commodity pipelines, marketing) and (iii) rural finance.

The effectiveness of operations has been satisfactory with regard to physical investments such as hydro-agricultural schemes and the development of rural infrastructure, but only average and variable with regard to water and soil conservation, extension work and land improvement. And it is still poor with regard to "soft" elements such as rural finance, despite the efforts advocated by the COSOP and implemented by projects to support sustainable local credit services.

Impacts are "visible" in the consolidation and increase of the target population's productive resources through the expansion of fruit-tree growing, crop diversification and consolidation of livestock numbers and health. With regard to job and income opportunities, the surveys carried out by this evaluation show that the beneficiaries of IFAD projects perceive an improvement more often than control groups do. However, projects show recurrent weaknesses in all aspects of support to marketing and the organization of commodity pipelines. There is also a countrywide problem in Morocco that penalizes producers (especially small-scale ones), not allowing them to exploit productive potential, nor in many cases to benefit from good selling prices.

With regard to household food security, the positive impact of projects is linked mainly to small and medium irrigation schemes and improvements in livestock production. The adoption by projects of approaches fostering the beneficiaries' participation and empowerment has had appreciable effects on the development and creation of a large number of associations and professional organizations covering various spheres in which qualified young people tend to hold an important place.

The sustainability of impacts depends on the future development both of the socio-economic and socio-political environment and also of the consolidation initiatives to be undertaken. Positive aspects are linked to the promotion of civil society and the consultation and contractualization of users, so that an assumption of responsibility for management and maintenance costs is now being seen – and often a good quality of physical outputs. On the other hand, aspects at risk are linked to such factors as the availability or otherwise of adequate technical and financial support in the ordinary resources of government agencies, combined with major cutbacks in the staff of such agencies and in budgetary allocations.

Innovation and replicability. IFAD projects have introduced innovations in their respective zones of operation in terms of both approaches and techniques. These approaches and techniques may be known elsewhere, but they are innovations in Morocco or in the project zones. Some of these innovations have already been taken up by other donors or supported by Moroccan public organizations (participatory management of irrigation schemes, small innovations with regard to drinking water supplies). Nevertheless, it should be noted that at the project execution stage, mechanisms (especially as concerns partnership with research and development institutions) have not always been put in place in order to identify (whether within the project or elsewhere), cultivate and promote innovations benefiting the intervention zones. Moreover, synergies between projects (loans) and technical assistance grants from IFAD are still fairly weak.

IFAD's performance. By indicating the reduction of rural poverty as the main objective of its projects, IFAD has been helping to highlight this problem in Morocco since the mid-1990s. IFAD's project formulation is on the whole consistent with the guidelines and the development concerns of the project action zones.
Project design still requires improvement with regard to rural finance, which has so far borne fairly modest fruit (limited volume of loans and number of clients), although it has aroused the interest of other potential parties who may intervene in IFAD's action zone. There is also a lack of any planned "strategy" for the withdrawal of projects from intervention zones in order to avoid sometimes unanticipated extensions. With regard to technical assistance grants, IFAD has followed a fairly active policy in support of the innovation, research and development sector, but it has not been successful enough to ensure a sufficiently close link between programmes benefiting from grants and projects benefiting from loans.

IFAD has organized monitoring and support missions for projects, and these have helped agencies to improve the execution of their programmes. It has also launched a pilot scheme to set up an informal network of multidisciplinary skills that acts on the request of the country portfolio manager to provide executing agencies with local support as needed. The presence within this network of resource people familiar with the objectives, outputs and working of IFAD projects is of considerable benefit for the development of IFAD's target regions. This interesting initiative has yet to be formalized and its mechanisms need to be fine-tuned, especially with a view to ensuring greater independence between project formulation on the one hand, and monitoring and supervision on the other.

With regard to partnership modus operandi, the following factors should be noted: (i) the space for policy dialogue needs to be broadened towards governmental actors (regions and provinces) and also towards non-governmental actors (NGOs, grass-roots organizations, the scientific community), which are experiencing a remarkable growth; and (ii) the portfolio managerial approach is still highly individualized, whereas a team approach would make it possible to meet the needs of projects in terms of supervision and support, and also allow more effective comparison of views and analyses within IFAD regarding cooperation between the Fund and Morocco. The latter point in fact reflects a general policy within IFAD towards portfolio management, a policy that deserves reflection and will obviously require additional human and financial resources if a team management approach is adopted.

Performance of the Government and its agencies. The agencies involved in implementing IFAD projects have on the whole performed well, as is seen from the level of physical outputs and the take-up rate of assigned funding. The most significant constraints facing projects and resulting from the performance of the Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development and Marine Fisheries include the following: (i) the divergence between commitments made by projects and the country's effective budgetary capacities, a situation that generally leads to delays in execution; (ii) the growing deficit in human resources within the various agencies (exacerbated by the voluntary severance programme), constituting a major handicap for project execution (the case of the Figuig Provincial Directorate of Agriculture is a good example); and (iii) the poor coordination of projects at the central level and the scant involvement of the Provincial Directorates of Agriculture in budgetary negotiations and arbitrage by their lead agency.

Despite the fact that projects have institutional set-ups intended to promote the convergence and pooling of the various partners' resources and skills, it has to be admitted that the working of the institutional partnership needs improvement. There are a number of reasons for this situation. With regard to the partnership between project executing agencies and grass-roots organizations, real progress is now being seen, as part of a general forward movement at the national level. However, this movement is still fragile for lack both of resources and of traditions of community work in the new economic and social contexts (on the one hand, market competition and withdrawal of the State, and, on the other, rural exodus and emigration of young people). Despite the real efforts recently made by certain projects, there are still difficulties in setting up impact-focused monitoring and evaluation systems, and in analysing and synthesizing the information generated by projects into proper performance charts so that execution can be piloted on the basis of objectives and anticipated results.

Thus, the formulation and implementation of IFAD's interventions have in general meant that the latter have been relevant and effective. There have also been some really positive effects, with a direct impact in terms of an improvement in the population's material resources and income, an improvement in living conditions in rural areas, the development of human and social capital, and wide-scale application of participatory concepts. These elements constitute a fairly solid launching pad for sustainable rural development.

Despite these essentially positive results of the IFAD programme in Morocco, certain weaknesses were noted, concerning particularly the following elements: (i) the support and optimization of productive activities (microfinance, but also marketing and commodity pipelines); (ii) insufficient collaboration with the main donors active in the country and lack of participation in discussion groups set up by these donors in Morocco, especially because of IFAD's absence in the field and the lack of specific resources; (iii) insufficient policy dialogue with governmental partners, civil society and the scientific community; (iv) weaknesses in execution support instruments, including monitoring and evaluation systems (which are still not sufficiently impact-focused) and technical support and mid-term review missions (which are infrequent and sometimes take place fairly late); and (v) insufficient synergy between grants and projects.

With a view to further consolidating IFAD's pioneering and innovating role with regard to reducing poverty and marginalization in rural areas, these aspects deserve special attention in the future.

Evaluation ratings

	Before the COSOP			After the COSOP
	PDPEO I*	PDRT	Synthesis	PDRTT	PDRZMH	PDPEO II	PDRMO	Synthesis	Average ARRI 2005 1
I.  Performance	4	5	4	4	5			5	4,4
- Relevance	4	4		4	5	4	5	5	5,1
- Effectiveness	4	5		4	5			5	4,2
- Efficiency	4	5		5	5			5	3,9
II.  Impact	3	4	4	5	5			5	4,16
Household resources	3**	5		4	5			5	4,4
Food security		5		5	5			5	4,1
Environment	4	4		4	4			4	3,9
Human capital		4		5	4			4	4,4
Social capital	3***	4		5	5			5	4,0
Access to markets				3	3			3
III. Sustainability	3	3	3	4	4			4	3,6
IV. Innovation and scaling-up	3	4	4	4	5			4	4,2
V. Non-project activities								4
VI. Performance of partners	4	4	4	4	4			4	4,0
IFAD	3	4		4	4			4	3,84
Cooperat. institution other donors	4	3		4	3			3,5	4,12
Government and PMU	5	4		4	4			4	4,06
General performance	3	4		4	5			4,4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* In the original version, the PDPEO I rating used a 4-point scale. In 2006-2007, the Office of Evaluation has shifted to a 6-point scale.
** Average of 4 for physical resources, 4 for agricultural production and 1 for financial resources.
*** Average of 3 for the development of cooperatives and 2 for the development of public institutions.
Rating scale : 6 = Very satisfactory, 5 = Satisfactory, 4 = Moderately satisfactory, 3 = Moderately insatisfactory, 2 = insatisfactory, 1 = Very insatisfactory.

Recommendations

Preparation of a new country strategy. Preparation of a new COSOP is anticipated, and this document must be drawn up in accordance with IFAD's new guidelines for the task and be based on IFAD's new action plan and the new operational guidelines now in force. Preparation of the new COSOP must also take the following factors into account:

• The changing situation with regard to poverty in Morocco, but also the obstacles to poverty reduction.
• New regional and national strategies and initiatives (the National Human Development Initiative, regional strategies) and sectoral intervention programmes, particularly in the spheres of rural development and natural resource management; in this context it will be important to reflect further on the prospects of multisectoral (and not solely agricultural) rural intervention.
• Establishment of partnerships with (i) public institutions, in order to take provincial and regional authorities into account, (ii) international organizations and (iii) non-governmental organizations (NGOs, cooperatives and other grass-roots associations) and the private sector, whose role deserves clearer definition.
• Possible lines of synergy between project activities (based on loans) and the activities of technical assistance grants
• The need to organize preparation of the new COSOP in the framework of a broadened consultation, and also to plan for its periodic updating and adjustment.

Revision and updating of the set-up and formulation of projects and certain sectoral approaches. A series of improvements is needed with regard to the formulation and setting up of projects at IFAD, especially the following:

• Fresh discussion is needed of projections with regard to planning, disbursement capacity and the availability of staff for projects, since such projections tend to be unrealistic; this recommendation also applies to the task of ensuring the sustainability of results and impacts.
• An overall review and updating of interventions is strongly recommended with regard to rural finance and support to microenterprises, in the light of IFAD's operational policies and changes in these subsectors in Morocco (development of microcredit products better suited to borrowers' needs and instruments to open up access to initial investments that microcredit associations cannot cover).
• The issue of marketing and the integration of IFAD's projects into appropriate commodity pipelines deserve special attention.
• Monitoring and evaluation systems must be improved through activities of ongoing support, exchange and sharing among the monitoring and evaluation teams of the various projects, and introduction of the results and impact management system (RIMS).

Strengthening of the mechanism for supporting operations, policy dialogue and the promotion of innovation:

• IFAD's capacities for execution support should be boosted, with more regular review and support missions and greater involvement in direct supervision.
• In conjunction with other international agencies, IFAD should step up its policy dialogue with the Moroccan Government, with a view to further improving the institutional and socio-economic context for implementation. Boosting IFAD's presence in the country (in an appropriate manner still to be defined) would facilitate the intensification of policy dialogue.
• There are two priorities with a view to promoting innovations and their replication: (i) establishment of a systematic collaboration framework between grants and projects (pilot schemes, analysis and capitalization, extension of benefits and lessons learned); and (ii) greater collaboration between innovation agents (NGOs, the research and development system, farmers, other development programmes) and IFAD's programme.

---

1/ The 2005 ARRI is the Annual Report on the Results and Impact of IFAD Operations evaluated in 2004. This column represents, as a reference, the average ratings of the projects evaluated in 2004.