Project rationale, Goal, specific objectives, strategies, implementation policy

General Strategy

As discussed in Chapter IV, the achievement of the goal requires, particularly in the case of tea and coffee, the establishment of modern processing industries, modern production organizations and effective forms of smallholders empowerment of the production and marketing process, as well as developing new market access and innovative marketing methods. The general strategy of the project is based on five basic prongs:

• securing production of top quality products requested by the international markets;
• associating Fair Trade private organizations to secure access to remunerative markets;
• empowering poor smallholder producers to full control of processing and marketing operations in tea and coffee;
• supporting farmer associations and private sector SMEs to produce and market new export crops; and
• ensuring sustainable credit for growers and processing/marketing enterprises.

A flexible approach. The project strategy may be implemented in several ways depending on the dynamic circumstances that will be encountered in the course of time in the different sub-sectors of intervention. For example, in the case of coffee, the project model described in Chapter VIII is constructed on the basis of one possible option, which is presented as an illustration and to provide a basis for costing the component and for estimating the financial and economic viability of the proposal. However, other options are possible, which cannot be fully examined at the moment, or may emerge as a result of the initial project activities, as indicated on Working Paper 12, Section 4.

Therefore, a general implementation strategy of the project would be flexibility. The approach will be more flexible in the sub-sectors where there are more options to be examined in detail at the time when actual implementation decisions are taken, in the light of circumstances that may change between the time of appraisal and the time of action in the field. However, in examining specific investment options, the project will be guided by a set of implementation principles, which would ensure that the project goal and specific objectives are achieved. Specific decisions will be taken during implementation after clearance from IFAD. The project includes mechanisms to release funds only against specific investment decisions that meet fully the project criteria as described below.