Lessons and recommendations

The unified Government of Yemen, together with its development partners, is now faced with the need to develop new policies to consolidate and preserve previous achievements while making a qualitative step in development planning so as to ensure more consistency of its programmes and a real participation of the population in the management of the development process. This is an even more pressing need in view of the additional burden on the economy created by the massive flow of returnees in the aftermath of the Gulf crisis.

At the policy level, the Government will have to address on a priority basis, the issue of how to increase its absorptive capacity. In this process, the coordination of external assistance will have to be enhanced. Without a significant and positive change in this matter, increasing the number of projects (particularly those which are highly dependent on long-term institutional support) will only aggravate an already serious problem.

The concentration of external assistance in some sub-sectors and geographical areas, largely results from the low priority given to the rainfed (or so-called marginal areas) in which the majority of the rural population live. A policy shift in favour of the traditional livestock/cereal sub-sector should be considered favourably as it would presumably favour natural resource conservation and growth with equity while facilitating the management of external assistance by government.

Enhancing people's participation in project design and implementation should become a major preoccupation for IFAD in Yemen. This would hopefully result in a more realistic assessment of the size of externally-supported public investments needed in the rural sector, and in better targetting of IFAD's interventions on the regions, activities and social groups most relevant to its mandate.

The evaluation mission's recommendations in accordance with the above mentioned are as follows: improving project implementation, focussing the projects on poverty alleviation, enhancing sustainable development and building-up internal political support for IFAD projects.

Improving project implementation

GOY and donors should attempt, at the project level, to define a clear role for management and technical assistance; draw effective programmes for training; and develop a serious attitude towards monitoring and evaluation. Opportunities for local community participation in project design should be created so that realisation and sustainability of benefits can be ensured.

Successful project implementation was found to be dependent on the following three factors:

(i) Strength and continuity of leadership;

(ii) Sharp Focus:[[Since successful projects were those which were focussed either on a relatively small number of beneficiaries (not exceeding 60[000 people) or on a specific type of activity; and

(iii) Extensive Management Support Component.[[The share of institutional support in total project costs seems to be critical.

These findings, should encourage IFAD to be generous in the provision of incentives and funds for project management, while focussing project objectives on its central target group/area/theme.

Focussing the projects on poverty alleviation

Projects whose purpose is to improve the productivity of the traditional grain-livestock food system are naturally targetted towards the poor in Yemen. Therefore, project concepts should be built around the problem of technology generation and dissemination for those food systems. It is simultaneously necessary that development planners, both national and international, reconsider the low priority ranking given to the traditional livestock/cereal sub-sector, if the above-mentioned kinds of projects are to be effective.

The handling of poverty alleviation and targetting issues needs to be more consistent through the project cycle. This entails:

(i) conducting more systematic socio-economic surveys with the aim of providing a basic understanding of the processes involved in poverty alleviation in the project area and, as a result, leading to an operational definition of the target group;

(ii) ensuring that the findings of such studies will actually be taken into consideration in project design. Poverty alleviation should become an operationally identifiable objective supported by project activities, not just an ultimate goal of the project; and

(iii) spelling out clearly and in greater detail what share of project resources would benefit directly the target group and the results expected; this implies setting targets in this respect.

The above is a prerequisite for strengthening project Monitoring and Evaluation Units in that it would provide them with a consistent and relevant format for organizing their own activities.

In the light of actual experience, there is no single best instrumentality for targetting the poor. The real lesson is that targetting is very demanding in terms of involvement from IFAD staff in all stages of the project cycle and in terms of national institutions' managerial capacity.

Nevertheless, there are promising approaches to targetting that should be given priority in future:

(i) Designing suitable technical and credit packages which are particularly attractive to resource poor farmers;

(ii) In Yemen, targetting broad categories of households is neither practical nor cost effective, while targetting poor villages is easier and is best suited to the country's social structure; and

(iii) Often, good targetting can be obtained through simple site specific criteria, and by considering at an early stage of project design what the preferences of the target group are so they can be built into project design.

It is also recommended to carefully select project areas so as to avoid projects aiming at increasing agricultural productivity in areas where land and water ownership is shared unevenly. The mission acknowledges that this might be a difficult recommendation to follow: since land ownership is often concentrated in areas of high potential, it may exclude too many of the few investment opportunities available in the agricultural sector. In these cases, and pending any other alternative, IFAD should focus to an even greater extent its projects on specific poverty alleviation targets.

Credit lines, even when they are made conditional, do not lend themselves easily to proper targetting and should therefore be avoided as well, pending some institutional and policy adjustments are implemented, for example: the practice of subsidized interest rates bears directly on the possibility of effectively targetting the poor as, in Yemen, access to credit is more important for the target group than low interest rates on loans, particularly in view of the small size of the loans they need and the short period of repayment (see paras 9-167).

Enhancing sustainable development

The injection of capital aimed at increasing natural resource mobilization in ecologically fragile environments is harmful unless:

(i) capital investment is primarily directed towards the conservation and efficient use of scarce natural resources, particularly underground water; and

(ii) there are effective institutions able to enforce resource conservation regulations. In their absence an adequate proportion of the project investment should be allocated for this purpose and Central Government should allocate the necessary budgetary resources.

Irrigation. Since water is the major limiting factor to agricultural production development, future projects should focus their objectives on water resource conservation. Project strategies should be more holistic to take into account the relationships that exist, in a given ecological unit, between different systems of water resource mobilisation such as spate and well irrigation. Farmers should be encouraged to introduce water saving technology.

As a guiding principle, future interventions in spate irrigation, should favour low-cost diversion structures and avoid sophisticated technical solutions which prove to be economically unjustifiable and difficult to operate properly.

The most critical issue in future planning will be to achieve the optimal mix of government and local responsibilities for creating and sustaining irrigation facilities. Careful consideration needs to be given to the implementation process, such that if farmers can be productively involved in implementation, changes are more likely to be adopted and sustained. Hence the importance that national technicians be trained in participatory design and implementation of irrigation projects.

Research and Extension. A major problem facing the extension service and ultimately the producer is the limited flow of appropriate technical packages verified under local conditions. In view of this, IFAD should reorient its focus, which has been leaning heavily towards extension, to give more emphasis to adaptive research.

Research and extension should be directed towards solving the problems of farmers. With respect to small farmers, who are of special interest to IFAD, their needs rest on technical packages suitable for rainfed agriculture (combined with livestock) and increased returns to water, the latter being the most scarce resource.

The organisation and implementation of field trials to test station research findings must be a joint cooperation between research and extension, with active farmer participation. This can bring into the research process a better participatory perspective on research/extension recommendations.

Credit. Projects should be designed to contribute to the long-term sustainability of the credit institution. Whenever this objective involves policy changes, the latter should be obtained before project effectiveness. As a matter of fact, project designers have often underestimated the difficulties involved in bringing about such changes.

There is a continuous need for IFAD to link credit with the dissemination and adoption of technical packages designed to help its target groups. A case in point are the technical packages for rainfed farmers and improvemes in livestock, including poultry, which is raised by women. A strong credit beneficiaries' monitoring and evaluation capacity should be established within the Cooperative Agricultural Credit Bank.

Building-up internal political support for IFAD projects

IFAD should pursue and further enlarge its dialogue with the Government to ensure that project resources are primarily channelled to the poor.

Poverty alleviation issues are not principally of a techno-economic nature. Experience strongly suggests that unless a desirable poverty alleviation/development objective fits with the chief interest of at least one party actively involved in the project, there will be little prospect for achieving the desired result.

For this reason, the mission believes it is an error to consider that socio-political issues are out of the scope of project analysis. In fact these issues are at the heart of the problem and therefore should be formally and positively considered in the process of project formulation and implementation. Ignoring them will often lead to results which are contrary to the original purpose.

In brief, it is not enough to design good projects. IFAD must also build political commitments to ensure that these projects would be given a fair chance to perform according to the set objectives. What kind of activities and approaches IFAD should consider, within and outside the project formulation process, to ensure political support to its endeavours, is an open question which should be considered in the development of a country strategy and of future operations. The Mission would recommend as a contribution to this process, that a discussion of this evaluation be held with the Yemeni authorities and other IFAD development partners during a workshop to be organised in Yemen.