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A purposive sample of 5 projects
• Ghana, the Village Infrastructure Project, VIP
• Mauritania, The Oases Development Project, ODP-2
• Senegal, Project d’Organisation et Gestion Villageoise, POGV-2
•Mali, Fond de Development Sahélien, FODESA
• Cape Verde, Programme de Lutte contre la Pauvreté Rurale,
PLPR
Criteria for selecting the projects:
• the project major thrust is to develop the rural communities,
through a demand driven participatory approach
• the projects represent different options for the organization and
management of the service delivery system, and
• the projects have been implemented for a sufficiently long
time, or represent a second phase of an earlier project with a
similar approach, to have accumulated experience that can be
usefully shared.
Features of CDD used to compare design and
implementation performance
• Scope for initiative by the Community Based
Organizations, CBOs
• Targeting instruments applied
• Contribution to improving the local system of
governance
Scope for CBO initiative
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Who determines the menu of project interventions?
What measures to ration demand?
Do CBOs implement their own micro-projects?
Do CBOs handle public resources in cash?
Do CBOs operate the rural financial services?
Do CBOs participate in project management?
How complex is the procedure to approve funding of
CBOs initiatives?
Who determines the menu
of project interventions?
• VIP, POGV-2, and ODP-2 offer a limited menu: production
and transport infrastructure, NRM, functional literacy;
credit is envisaged only to groups engaged in productive
activities
• FODESA and PLPR are very liberal, a community can ask
support for any priority initiative, except if it falls in a
simple negative list (determined jointly with the
communities in the case of the PLPR)
• During implementation, eligible activities were increased
in Mauritania and Ghana, to accommodate strong demand
for basic “social needs”
Participation of the CBOs in the delivery system
• The VIP does not envisage a role for the CBOs; CBOs are
users of services produced and delivered by somebody else
• ODP-2, POGV-2, and PLPR envisage a key role for the
CBOs in the implementation phase of their priority
projects (participation in design, contracting, supervision
of deliveries, clearance of payments)
• FODESA design included the above as well, but
implementation has been rather different so far
• In no case do CBOs handle project cash
Providing rural financial services
• The VIP had a credit component, which did not envisage
supporting community based MFIs
• A matching grant mechanism was introduced after MTR
• By the end of phase 1, FODESA had not managed to contract
the component designed to develop the MFIs
• The PLPR and the POGV did not have a MFI component
• The MFI component of the ODP in Mauritania was quite
successful, despite some problem with loan delinquencies
CBOs participation in project management
• The PLPR and ODP-2 have established close partnerships
between the project and the CBOs
• In Cape Verde, the leaders of the CBOs are full right
members of the CRP, which is the operating unit of the
PLPR
• In Mauritania, the ODAs (Oasis Development
Associations) are the planning and executive agent of the
project at community level
• FODESA was also to establish partnerships with the CBOs
but for a variety of reason did not manage so far
• The VIP did not envisage a management role for any actor
other than the local government
The FODESA experience highlights a problem
with the CBOs participation in project
management organizations
• The partnership of project and CBOs established by
FODESA at regional level was an impractical solution
• Too many CBOs potentially members of the association
• FODESA project re-orientation suggested to decentralize at
district level
• The ODP experience: project reorientation cut down the
number of ODAs from 400 to 200
• The POGV deals with about 600 villages
• The PLPR does not have the problem: there are only a few
communities in each of the islands where there is a CRP
Complexity of processes and procedures
Two extreme cases:
• FODESA applied AGETYPE procedures designed for large
public investment projects
• The First Phase review counted over 20 bureaucratic steps to
get a micro-project implemented
• As a result, the project could not negotiate the large number
of small contracts required to fulfill the participatory
implementation policy envisaged
• To manage its administration costs, the Project sidelined its
community capability building objectives and concentrated
delivery contracts in the hands of few private sector
contractor foreign to the receiver community
An interesting concrete instance of project induced elite
capture of benefits that has little to do with elite
dominance at the community level
….more on procedures
Quite opposite the case of the PLPR:
• Government introduced special instruments to transfer public
funds to the CRP, the associations of the civil society that
implement the PLPR
• These instruments embody two key concepts:
• Government approves a 3-years indicative plan, and
• The principle of ex post control on the AWP&B of the CRPs
The result is a remarkable simplification of procedures, that
enables the CBOs to participate in all the stages of their
project implementation
Targeting instruments
Four sets of instruments were introduced:
• Ex ante selection of target community and related
exclusion criteria
• Exclusion vs. non-exclusion within the community
• Specific measures to secure a role for women and the poor
• Self-targeting mechanisms applied to the support of
specific activities
Targeting communities
• Four projects target the village (or the oasis)
• The PLPR targets any CBO of poor people (as defined by
the GoCV policy reduction policy paper)
Criteria of community exclusion:
• VIP and PLPR have none
• ODP-2 excludes oases owned by absentee landlords
• FODESA excludes non-vulnerable villages, based on food
self-sufficiency indicators
• PGOV-2 excludes villages that have badly performed
under a predecessor project
Exclusion vs. non-exclusion
within a target community
No project discriminates specifically against wealthy or
otherwise dominant members of the society within a
community eligible for project support
This greatly facilitates the mobilization of the community
and avoids opposition to project intervention
Specific measures to facilitate “inclusiveness”
i.e. how to secure a role to women and poor HHs
• VIP initially did not address the question
• ODP-2, POGV-2, FODESA require to have women
member of all CBO institutions and operating bodies
• PLPR relies on the consensus of the communities on the
role of women and the poor, supported by the animation
service of the CRPs
• All projects record easy formal acceptance by the
communities of a new role of women in the CBOs
ODP-2 records considerable success in securing a pro-active
role for women, in the ODAs and in the MFIs, enhanced
by the impact of the functional literacy programme
Important self-targeting instruments
• Ceilings on the amount of project funding of community
initiatives (per micro-project, per HH of partner involved),
automatically excludes wealthy members of the community
(Cape Verde)
• Access to credit is more important to the poor than the cost
of credit, MFIs set interest rates higher than commercial
banks, which excludes borrowers that have access to formal
credit, while attracting deposits from them
• Refusal to pay the labor required to construct irrigation
infrastructure activates the traditional rule that entitles those
who supply the labor the right to share the land they helped
to develop (Guinea)
CDD contribution
to improving local governance
Three key point:
• Establishing sustainable CBO within and beyond the
individual community to create the conditions for effective
participation and empowerment
• Support of project policy by the political environment and
the public administration
• Controlling the impact of local elite dominance
Creating sustainable CBOs
The VIP experience:
• The VIP tried to reach the communities through the
decentralized public administration
• At the level of the the District Assemblies it did not work,
priorities are different, level too far away from the village
• At Area Council level, the activation of public delivery
mechanisms was much more effective
• In Ghana, Area Councils are much nearer to the village,
and the gap with the District is quite wide
The Mauritania and Cape Verde experience
• In Mauritania and Cape Verde the governments enacted
legislation that recognizes the public utility of private
associations of the civil society engaged in poverty
alleviation and/or community development,
• such as the ODAs and the CRPs,
• In both countries, the respective roles of the associations
and of the decentralized public administration have not yet
been clearly defined
• Representative vs. participatory democracy
On the capture of project benefits
by the elites dominant in the communities
• There is little objective evidence collected on this issue
• An insight can be gained by analyzing the emerging
pattern of effective community demand
This signals that communities attach priority to investing their
own resources to match project intervention:
• first in basic “social needs” (water, house improvement,
functional literacy, health care),
• followed by income generation activities, when the
minimum social needs are satisfied,
• and attach low priority to NRM
The projects experience suggests that:
So far at least…
• The CDD approach has not resulted in serious cases of
capture of project benefits by the local dominant elites
• On the contrary there are clear signals of the influence of
women in the decision about common preferences!
Whereas the risk may increase as community demand to
support income generation activities increases,
• capture of project benefits by agents external to the
communities (administrators, contractors) induced by
inappropriate implementation procedures is a higher risk at
the moment.
Impact of the projects on the local economy
• A completion evaluation is available only for ODA-2, which
incorporates advanced CDD features
• It suggests a very positive impact, through increased
agricultural production and activation of many other income
generation activities (mostly women led)
• The emerging pattern of demand in Mali, Cape Verde, and
Senegal suggests that the impact depends of existing economic
opportunities, and may well be slow to start but growing with
the passing of time
• The impact of the project direct investment expenditure has
been below the potential of the amount of resources used
Cost of the CDD approach
How much does the CDD approach cost?
At appraisal, the estimated cost of project management was:
• 14% of total project cost in the case of FODESA
• 10% and 15% respectively in the case of the POGV-2 and
the PLPR
• and 24% in the case of the ODP-2
The cost of training included in the other components was:
• 6% of total project cost in the case of FODESA
• 16% and 12% respectively in the case of the POGV-2 and
the PLPR
• And 19% in the case of the ODP-2
A clear concept of CDD emerges from the review
• CDD is a way to unleash the potential for change of the rural
communities
• Rural communities have institutions that can be used (and
improved) to achieve IFAD corporate objectives
• CDD means empowering the communities to shape their own
institutional and socio-economic development
• CDD addresses contextually the institutional system within
and around the communities
• CDD focuses on organizations of members of a Community
(the CBOs) as the building blocks of socio-economic
transformation that enhance opportunities for individual HHs
• CDD encourages the establishment of linkages that empower
the CBOs to offset the negative impact of government and
market failures
An operational concept of community
A locus where everybody can have the opportunity
to make his/her voice heard directly on matters of
public choice
• A territory
• Everybody (can) know(s) each other
• Shared institutions of local governance
Lessons learned on the projects
institutional setting
The projects faced two options
to reach the communities
• Through the public administration
• Through civil society organizations
and the private sector
Lessons learned on the first option:
Need to find the right level to reach the communities:
• The district is far too remote (insufficient
subsidiarity)
• Districts have no specific capacity to deal with
village problems (insufficient specialization)
• Clear risk that, without corrective measures, district
administrations replicate at their level the centralized
approach that prompted administration reform in the
first place
…. more
Sub-district units of the public administration are more
effective activators of delivery mechanisms for the
communities
But still view the communities:
• only as users of services
• not as subjects of change in their own right
The gap between district and sub-district level of the local
government is often very wide
The respective mandates are not defined
Need to balance the hierarchical relations with the higher
levels of the local government
Need to establish separate funding channels to support district
and community initiatives
Advantages of the second option:
Partnerships that join together the CBOs, the civil society, and
the private sector, besides the government:
• Provide access to a wider horizon and more sources of
support than just the government
• Facilitate transparency of operations and accountability to
their members
• Ensure the single allegiance of CBO leaders to the
membership
• Can adopt community-friendly procedures
• Force the CBOs to devise the instruments of their own
sustainability and growth
• Establish centers of pluralistic governance and promote
autonomous advocacy of community interests
Lessons learned on the second option:
Governments may not agree with a policy aimed at pluralistic
governance
If instead there is agreement in principle:
• Need to define the role, functions, and responsibilities of the
partnerships
• And their relationships with the local government with
respect to the five components of service provision
(regulation, planning, production, delivery and financing)
The two options:
Are not mutually exclusive, and in the course of time may
well complement one another
In either case, the CDD approach involves changes in the
institutions
and this requires effective and continuous
policy dialogue
Police dialogue
is essential to:
• reach understanding and agreement with government on the
project CDD approach before projects start
• keep projects on the right track during implementation
The right venue for policy dialogue is important
There are many other lessons learned….
Let us leave more to tomorrow session
End of Presentation
Thank You