FSSD/MR/043/99
UNITED NATIONS
ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA
FOOD SECURITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT DEVISION
TECHNICAL PUBLICATION
AN ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTRUAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN WEST AFRICA.
Addis Ababa December, 1999
FSSD/MR/043/99
UNITED NATIONS
ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA
FOOD SECURITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT DEVISION
TECHNICAL PUBLICATION
AN ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTRUAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN WEST AFRICA.
Addis Ababa December, 1999
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES IN AFRICA
1.1 The Concept of Agricultural Development 1
1.2 The Benefits of Agricultural Growth 2
1.3 The Problem of Agricultural Growth in West Africa 3
1.4 The Links Between Agricultural Growth and Agricultural Development 8
H THE EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
PROJECT
STRATEGIES IN AFRICA
2.1 Commercialization trough Cash Cropping 11
2.2 Community Development 12
2.3 Basic Human Needs 12
2.4 Regional Integration in Industry and Self-Sufficiency in Food 13
2.5 Structural Adjustment Progammes 14
2.6 Sustainable Development 16
2.7 Democratization and the Development of the Private Sector 17
m PROJECT DESIGN IN AFRICA FOR DEALING WITH
AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
3.1 Why a Project Approach 19
3.2 Design Characteristics of the Main Project Classes 19
IV MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL
DEVELOPMENT
4.1 The Imperative to Measure Performance 22
4.2 Indicators of Measuring Performance 23
4.3 Methodology for Measuring Performance 25
V FACTORS AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
5.1 Technical Factors 26
5.2 Economic Factors 27
5.4 Socia! Factors 27
5.5 Institutional Factors 27
5.6 Unpredictable Factors 28
VH ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY 28
ANNEXES
I SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE (ENGLISH) 29
H SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE (FRENCH) 35
I. AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES IN AFRICA
The Concept of Agricultural Development
It is a well-recognized fact that the performance of the agricultural sector is a major determinant of the performance of the overall economy in many of the countries of Africa.
This is not only because of the overwhelming contribution of agriculture to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the countries of the region but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of the preponderance of the citizens of the continent who depend for the most part on agriculture for their very survival. It is the perceived importance of their agricultural sectors in their overall economies that has prompted virtually every country in Africa to, with varying degrees of commitment, identify agricultural growth as a major national development goal.
Agricultural development will require agricultural growth in many African countries.
Agricultural development in Africa must, however be seen in the context of overall economic development. Historically, economic development was defined as the capacity of a national economy, whose initial economic condition has been more or less static for a long time, to generate and sustain a rate of growth that is faster than the growth rate of its population. In this sense, economic development was typically seen in terms of the planned alteration of the structure of production and employment so that agriculture's share of both declines while that of the manufacturing and service sectors increases. The experience of the 1950s and 1960s, when a large number of Third World nations did achieve the overall UN economic growth targets while the levels of living of the masses remained, for the most part, unchanged, signaled the beginning of conceras with this narrow traditional definition of development. An increasing number of economists and policy makers began to demand for the "dethronement of GNP" as a measure of economic development and to call for measures that used widespread poverty, inequitable income distributions and rising unemployment, as better indicators of the level of economic under-development. As a result, during the 1970s, economic development came to be redefined in terms of the reduction or elimination of poverty, inequality and unemployment within the context of a growing economy. "Redistribution from growth"
became the key concern and questions such as: What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? became more important.
It should, however, be observed that there were no absolute conditions, which were identified for objectively measuring the state of development of all countries. Nor was there a generally accepted set of economic and social indicators, to trace the progress of countries from underdevelopment to full development, although some indicators (e.g. gains in literacy.
schooling, health conditions and services and provision of housing) were widely used as signs of progress.
In the African context, underdevelopment must be seen as a culturally determined assessment of what is a satisfactory quality of life for Africans. The methods of assessment are likely to differ between the western industrialized countries, the Asian countries and African countries. What the on-going socio-economic crisis in Africa has done is to expose the continuing shortcomings in the perception of economic development by African decision makers and the inadequacy of the policies applied by governments to plan and manage their national economies. From the African perspective agricultural development can therefore, be said to require that farms operate efficiently and profitably, farmers' incomes exceed the poverty level, significant investments take place at the farm level, and farmers adopt new and improved technologies on a routine and regular basis. When these conditions obtain, a dynamic agricultural growth process can be expected to set in with the agricultural sector modernizing, while at the same time continuing to produce cheap food and releasing labour to the non-agricultural economy. It is as a result of this inter-relationship that rapid agricultural growth is a critical pre-condition for agricultural development, which is, in turn, a necessary condition for rapid economic development in many African countries.
The Benefits of Agricultural Growth
Analyses done by the world Bank clearly shows that agricultural growth is a necessary, though not sufficient condition for economic growth in African economies (Cleaver, 1997).
For example, it has been estimated that to obtain an overall economic growth rate of six to seven per cent per annum, which is considered to be necessary to reduce the number of poor people by two per cent per annum, agriculture has to grow by four to five per cent per annum.
This strong linkage is due not only to the large contribution of agriculture to GDP, but also to fact that the vast majority of industries in Africa are agriculture related. So the faster agriculture grows, the faster the overall economy grows and the faster the relative size of the agricultural sector declines.
The benefits of accelerated agricultural growth are both direct and indirect. Improved technologies capable of increasing agricultural yield can directly overcome the debilitating effects of a rapidly growing population and rising income levels since, in countries, the land area is usually fixed. This direct benefit is rooted in EngePs Law, whereby the proportion of total expenditure on food declines with rising income levels, even though the total consumption
and the proportion of expenditure on important sub-classes of food increases. For this benefit to materialize, it is not enough that the agricultural sector generate a surplus. Mechanisms and activities must be in place to transmit some of the productivity gains of the agricultural sector to the other sectors. Staatz et al (1993) suggest that the most important of these mechanisms and activities include: expropriation of farm products, capturing of land rents either by the state or by private landlords, fostering private inter-sectoral resource transfers, reducing the price of agricultural products and reducing consumer food prices relative to the price of other goods.
In addition to the direct impact of transferring resources from the agricultural sector to the non-agricultural sector, indirect benefits also exist as a result of changes in the relative prices of agricultural commodities vis-a-vis non-agricultural commodities. The most important of these relate to increases in real incomes in the cities that occur as a result of these changes.
Poor people living in the rural and urban areas spend a large proportion of their incomes on food. Whenever there is agricultural growth followed by a reduction in food prices, their real incomes increase. Furthermore, when agricultural growth takes place and farm incomes increase, the consumption by farmers of products and services made in the cities increase.
The Problem of Agricultural Growth in West Africa
To get an idea of the nature and magnitude of the problem of agricultural growth in West Africa, let us start by examining the agricultural potential of the sub-region. As in most sub-regions of Africa, the agricultural potential of West African counties is determined by the prevailing biophysical conditions (natural factors), human resources, the economic environment and the infrastructures that are in place. The amount and distribution of rainfall as well as the availability of good quality soils are the major natural factors which also influence agricultural growth. Estimates of the quantity of land resources in the countries of the countries of West Africa are presented in Table 1.
An indication of the performance of the agricultural sectors of the countries of West Africa during the last three decades is presented in Figure 1 which depicted the aggregate trends of per capita agricultural output. It is clear from the table and the figure that, while there have been pockets of good performance, agricultural growth has been at best, flat in the West Africa sub-region during the last two decades. The situation has been further aggravated by rapid increase in the population of the countries of the sub-region. Table 3 provides an indication of population growth and fertility rates in West Africa.
The countries of the sub-region show considerable variation in size and spatial distribution of their populations. It includes countries with small land areas and populations such as Gambia as well as countries such as Nigeria with large areas and large populations.
Some of the countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger are large and sparsely populated while others such as Guinea-Bissau have relatively high population densities. The countries also vary in terms of their levels of resource endowments, colonial legacies, political and development experiences, levels of urbanisation and the rates of growth of their total and urban populations. These diversities, in part, reflect variations in climate, soils, topography and ecology. The variations and diversity have combined to shape and influence the patterns of growth and spatial distributions of the populations in the sub-region, which in turn, has determined the existing cropping and livestock production systems
Table1:WestAfrica:LandResourcesandLandUse(1997) Country Benin BurkinaFaso CapeVerde Coted'ivoire Gambia Ghana Guinea Guinea-Bissau Liberia Mali Niger Nigeria Senegal SierraLeone Togo
Totallandarea'000ha 11062 27360 403 31,800 1000 22754 24572 2812 9632 122019 126670 91077 19253 7162 5439
Cultivatedarea '000ha 1595 3440 41 7350 200 4550 1485 350 327 4650 5000 30738 2266 546 2430
Irrigatedarea 20 25 3 73 2 11 95 17 2 86 66 233 71 29 7 Source:FAO,StatisticsDatabase,1999
Figure 1. Trends in Average Per Capita Agricultural Output in West Africa. 1961-1998 M989-'91 =100)
180 160 140 120
£ 100
£ 80
60 40 20
Western Africa excluding Nigeria
1961 1966 1971 1976 1981
Years
1986 1991 1996
180 160 140 120 g 100
-a£ 80
60
40 20 0
Nigeria
1961 1966 1971 1976 1981
Years
6
1986 1991 1996
Source: FAO Database 1999
Table2:WestAfrica:PopulationGrowthandFertilityRates Country Benin BurkinaFaso Coted'lvoire Gambia Ghana Guinea GuineaBissau Liberia Mali Niger Nigeria Senegal SierraLeone Togo TOTAL
Total Population (1995) (million) 5.41 10.48 0.A39 13.69 1.10 17.34 7.35 1.07 2.12 10.80 9.15 111.72 8.31 4.19 4.08 207.22
AverageAnnual GrowthRate 1995-2000 (percent) 2.80 2,80 2.48 2.01 2.26 2.79 21.35 1.98 2.56 3.03 3.32 2.84 2.66 2.97 2.70 2.81
TotalFertility Ratea/ 1995-2000 5.83 6.57 3.56 5.10 5.20 5.28 6.61 5.42 6.33 6.60 7.10 5.97 5.62 6.06 6.08. 5.95
1995 31.3 27.2 54.3 43.6 25.5 36.3 29.6 22.2 45.0 27.0 53.8 17.0 42.3 36.2 30.8 36.6
UrbanPopulationb/ 2010 40.3 54.7 72.6 54.1 36.7 46.6 41.6 32.6 54.7 38.1 65.3 25.0 51.7 48.1 40.6 48.V5
%Increase 28.75 101.10 33.70 24.08 43.92 28.37 40.54 48.85 21.55 41.11 21.37 47.06 2.22 32.87 31.80 32.51 a/TheTotalFertilityRate(TFR)istheaveragenumberofchildrenwhowouldbebornalivetoawomenduringherlifetimeif sheweretopassthroughchildbearingyearsconformingtotheage-specificfertilityratesofgivenyear. b/....UnitedNationsmediumvariantprojections.
The Links Between Agricultural Growth and Agricultural Development
A major national objective of all the countries of West Africa is to drastically reduce the number of poor people. Because the majority of the poor people in the sub-region are not only rural but also depend heavily on agriculture for their wellbeing, many African Governments now accept that, the achievement of their poverty reduction goal will require agricultural development. Given the high economic dependence on agriculture of almost on the countries of West Africa, their low levels of per capita food supplies and their limited capacities to increase food supplies through imports, growth of incomes form agricultural activities is intricately limited to agricultural development.
Because of the relatively low capital out put ratios and relatively high labour output ratios in the agricultural sectors, charges from agricultural growth usually affect the agricultural development process. The linkages involved here operate through four potential avennes in the factor and labour markets. The factor market linkages involve capital and labour flows between farm and non-farm enterprises while the product market linkages involve backward production flows from agriculture to rural suppliers, forward production flows from agriculture to processors and distributors, and consumer demand flows generated as a result of increasing farm incomes. These linkages induce agricultural development through increases in household expenditures on consumer goods and services, increased use of farm inputs, processing, and marketing and transport services needed to handle larger and larger outputs. In short, farmers spend more on their farm requirements, sell more in the markets, and buy more household goods and services as a result of these linkages. As their incomes grow, people in the rural economy begin to spend more and more on goods and services produced in small labour-intensive enterprises which can make an important contribution to rural employment.
Farm households whose expenditures promote labour-intensive growth usually spend the biggest share of their extra incomes on goods and services consumed almost entirely within the rural economy, mostly non-food items, but including horticultural and livestock products.
The multipliers are larger when the goods and services demanded have high supply elasticities.
Furthermore, the more raw materials the rural economy can supply to the industrial sector the greater the contribution of the agricultural development capacity of the latter. For example, Donovan (1997) reports that agriculture based industries, which contributed more than the labour payments of the entire manufacturing sector in Kenya, relied on agricultural raw materials for almost a quarter of their output.
Strong agricultural growth is essential for rapid agricultural development because it can perform three important roles in generating employment and incomes and ensuring food security.
• It can help the people of the country feed themselves either directly or through income generation;
• It can leverage farm/non-farm linkages and stimulate broader agricultural and economic growth; and
• It can respond and adapt flexibly to the income generation process by developing new products and services to satisfy successive rounds of induced agricultural development.
There are, of course, some tradeoffs between and among the potential roles listed above. In the short-run, efforts to increase agricultural growth will improve the level of agricultural development. But if the problem of agricultural development is essentially a problem of low incomes, as has been suggested by a member of studies, then the road to sustainable agricultural development will involve much more than straightforward interventions directed at achieving agricultural growth. In this case, there will be need to pursue agricultural development strategies that incorporate large numbers of the poor in the rural areas into a self- sustaining process of growth.
For agricultural growth to contribute significantly to agricultural development, it is not enough that agriculture generate a surplus simply by growing. Mechanisms must be put in place to transmit the productivity growth to other sectors as the new economy. These mechanisms are needed to facilitate the net transfer of resource across sectors. Historically, one of the most important transfer mechanisms used in West Africa has been Agricultural Development Project (ADP).
H. THE EVOLUTION OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT STRATEGIES IN AFRICA.
The strategies that have shaped agricultural development projects in Africa over the last two decades have been influenced by a number of common characteristics including the following: (Delgado, 1995)
1. Virtually all of the countries in Africa were subjected for at least 80 years to one form or another of European colonial rule, a fact that still affects development patterns today.
2. Many of the countries of the region became independent at roughly the same time, during a short period at the start of the 1960s.
3. All but five African countries were subjected to explicit or implicit military rule during most of the first two decades of independence.
4. African nations emerged during a highly polarised phase of human history-the Cold War.
5. The common influence of major shifts in world economic events-such as commodity booms, oil shocks, and foreign assistance-on developing countries as a group has been arguably greater in the historical period of Africa's emergence since the 1960s than was the case in earlier periods.
6. The common influence of demographic factors such as high population growth rates that are prevalent in many African countries tends to distinguish the region from other areas of the world.
7. African intellectuals have, until recently, been largely educated in a relatively small number of non-African countries.
8. The same groups of expatriate thinkers have played a major role in the intellectual elaboration of the agricultural development strategies of many countries in the continent.
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9. A relatively small group of donor agencies has had a huge influence over the allocation of public goods investment in African countries which, in turn, has influenced the evolution of agriculture in the continent.
Delgado (1995) has identified eight paradigms, which have shaped the evolution of ADPs in Africa. These include:
1. Commercialization through cash cropping;
2. Basic Human needs;
3. Regional integration in industry and self-sufficiency in food
4. Structural adjustment (demand management);
5. Structural adjustment with a human face;
6. Sustainable development
7. Democratization and the development of the private sector.
Commercialization through Cash Cropping (CTCC)
Starting around 1910 in most areas, export cropping took off in earnest after the end of the Second World War, with the rapid expansion of cropped area per agricultural worker following the expansion of cash cropping for export. At the time, agricultural production was constrained primarily by lack of access to markets and services and seasonal labour bottlenecks in indigenous farming systems. The CTCC model was extremely effective in that comprehensive schemes that narrowly focused on boosting the output of specific items were combined with "new" seeds for plants with significantly different seasonal labour profiles than the traditional food crops. It involved the expansion of cash crops such as peanuts, cotton, and cocoa. The heyday of cash crop expansion continued throughout the 1960s. This period saw secular improvement in world commodity prices, fuelled by the post-war expansion in world trade, until the first oil shock of 1973. The CTCC paradigm was primarily a growth strategy, consistent with the then prevailing view that growth and development were synonymous and that the binding constraint on growth was foreign exchange. It was also consistent with the prevailing view at the time that the role of agriculture in economic development was as a
source of resources for industrialization.
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Community Development (CD)
Community development projects started in the late 1950s and 1960s. They were attempts to provide non- revolutionary sources of change in rural areas, and were especially meant to keep rural people occupied in the countryside until economic growth could speed up enough outside agriculture to absorb new entrants to the labour force. While there were differences of emphasis between various approaches to community development, the key elements with respect to agriculture were the same. They typically involved a package of rural social services and cottage-industry promotion, yet the financing of these services continued to come from the profits taxed from export cropping. As such, the agricultural development part of the community development paradigm continued to resemble the commercialization-via-cash-cropping paradigm, including the earlier emphasis on small holders, and an emphasis on technical assistance, extension, and capital transfer. As an agricultural development paradigm, community development had the added dimension relative to the earner cash cropping of emphasising the quality of human labour input (such as schooling, skills, and health) in agricultural production strategies.
Community development activities in Africa were largely patterned after the programs developed in India in the 1950s and were run as projects. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they evolved, along with growth-oriented cash-cropping packages, into integrated rural development schemes. African integrated rural development projects of the period, while emphasising broad social development, continued to look to cash cropping as the engine of growth, and tended to be concentrated in export- crop-growing areas. Gradually, in the early 1970s, the compatibility of the commercialization-via-cash- cropping paradigm with the social agenda of community development came to be criticised, marking the rise of a new paradigm with major consequences for agricultural strategies.
Basic Human Needs (BHN)
Beyond the general concern with rural poverty in the community development paradigm in the 1950s and 1960s, the basic human needs (BHN) paradigm argued for a direct approach to meeting the basic needs of the poor as quickly as possible. "Basic1 needs were taken to include adequate nutrition, health, and access to education. The direct approach to meeting needs was in contrast to the "trickle- down" approach of the cash-cropping paradigm.
The rise of BHN was part of the broader refocusing of concern in development economics that has been called the "growth-with-equity era". In Africa, the advent of
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The BHN paradigm was importantly linked with:
1. The mush- rooming of capital cities and an urban under-class due to the urban bias widely represented in policies of the 1970s;
2. Declining terms of trade for most smallholder-produced agricultural commodities, combined with a commodity boom for those lucky enough.to have access to coffee, tea, or cocoa land, which heightened rural inequality;
3. Major drought in the early 1970s that focused the world's attention on the extent of poverty and famine in the Sahel and Ethiopia; and
4. Major expansion in development assistance flows to Africa in the 1970s, which financed most of the BHN interventions.
As policy, BHN was a statement of priorities for allocation of programmatic and public investment resources. It undoubtedly guided donor priorities in the 1970s, and it was reflected in African national priorities in particular through major national emphasis on food production for increased self- sufficiency. As a development paradigm, it argued that improving the welfare, education, technical knowledge, and active participation of all people-especially those at risk-will do more to increase both productive capacity and actual production than growth strategies that rely on economic linkages (trickle-down) for transmission of benefits.
Regional Integration in Industry and self-sufficiency in Food (RIISF)
Concurrent with the BHN paradigm in the 1970s, overall economic strategy in Africa, as elsewhere, tended to emphasize industrialization. Given the size of the market in most African countries, this started first as import substitution for a very limited range of consumer items such as beer, matches, and textiles. Even this substitution was dependent on regional market-sharing arrangements.
Although RIISF in the 1970s was not an agricultural development paradigm per se, it had two major effects on agriculture in Africa:
1. A steady appreciation of the real exchange rate, due to the policy measures designed to support industrialization. This had the effect of discouraging export crop production; and
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2. Overvalued exchange rates and the rising urban population directly encouraged rapidly rising food imports for urban areas and prices of non-tradable traditional foods (roots and tubers, millet, and so forth) increased relative to imported rice and wheat in cases of exchange overvaluation.
At the same time, the world environment was also conducive to a greater focus on food production. Policy thinking was influenced by two events in particular: the 1974 drought and famine in the Sahel and Ethiopia and the 1975 world price hike for rice following the 1973 oil shock. These events, combined with rising relative prices for traditional food staples, caused increased concern about African domestic food production in the 1970s.
The policy response focused on boosting African food production and creating parastatal marketing organizations to feed the city populations. In West Africa, major investments were made during this period in dams for irrigated rice production. Farming systems research, with a particular emphasis on traditional food crops, became more important. During this period, support for the principle of giving priority to small- holder food production systems in Africa spanned the ideological spectrum from neo-classical liberals to neo-Marxist dependency theorists.
Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP)
Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) lending by the World Bank and IMF began around the late 1970s. There were two segmental versions of the Structural Adjustment Programmes: Structural Adjustment-Demand Management (SADM) and Structural Adjustment within a Human Face (SAHF).
SADM was a reaction to the events of the 1970s, most particularly to unsustainable budget deficits and foreign exchange shortages. The strategy underlying SADM was based on the premise that the emerging agricultural and overall development problems were the result of artificially distorted price incentives. SADM therefore focus on measures to promote macroeconomic balance through aggregate demand management. Economic adjustment required shifting incentives from net consumers of tradables (civil servants, workers in protected manufacturing industries, service providers, and so forth) to net producers of tradables. The latter overwhelmingly were smallholder farmers producing agricultural exportables. Unfortunately, corrections needed to occur just when the external terms of trade for Africa's agricultural exports were falling rapidly.
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The SADM paradigm was essentially based on four actions:
1. Freeing up the nominal exchange rate, to permit it to move in reaction to supply and demand pressures on foreign exchange reserves, which meant substantial
devaluation in most cases;
2. Moving toward unification of tariffs, with the objective of unifying effective exchange rates faced by different sectors;
3. Undertaking fiscal austerity, thus preventing rapidly rising wages from reclaiming any reduction in net consumption of tradables to be had from devaluation; and
4. Liberalizing markets, to ensure that increased foreign exchange earnings from export crops would make their way back to farmers and not go to reimburse the debts of parastatals.
Unlike the paradigms of the 1970s, the early SADM presented a clear, internally consistent and theoretically based strategy for promoting agriculture, which could be implemented by policy reforms (as opposed to expensive investments). But as an agricultural paradigm, it was essentially passive: it said what not to do. The pro- active policy content primarily concerned events outside the agricultural sector per se, and it only peripherally addressed non-price policy issues within agriculture.
Declining real world prices for Africa's agricultural exports, drought, and declining per capita real incomes in African rural areas led to severe concern about what was happening to the poor in a time of macroeconomic retrenchment. SAHF was intended to protect the vulnerable in society while promoting growth. Its basic tenets were that the poor are the ends and not the means of growth and that redistribution can be justified, even if it lowers aggregate production in the short run. The broader paradigm that arose as part of these concerns starts from the premise that basic macroeconomic adjustment of the earlier SADM is necessary. It, however, questions whether adjustment can take place at all without a proactive effort to involve the poor in growth.
The SAHF paradigm focuses on three classes of actions:
1. The need to know the direct effects of adjustment on the poor, and what can be done to alleviate these effects directly, for example, by slowing down the
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adjustment process or putting greater emphasis on supply increase rather than demand
contraction.
2. Opportunities in the economy for rent extraction from the poor should be removed, supporting the emphasis in structural adjustment programs on market liberalization.
3. Proactive policies that help generate income for the poor should be emphasized, even where these have a small cost in overall efficiency.
The primary debate within this paradigm is the division between those who see poverty alleviation and structural adjustment as complementary strategies or as being at least neutral to each other in the long run, and those who claim that there are major contradictions between structural adjustment policies of the SADM type and long-run poverty alleviation objectives. In the World Bank, a new emphasis has been placed on social safety nets, in the form of both inquiry into "the social dimensions of adjustment" and supplementary project activity to mitigate the effects on the poorest sectors. Yet even some otherwise mainstream authors question whether the effects on the poor of adjustments of the magnitude that Africa is making can be handled by add-on social programs, as opposed to a modification of adjustment strategy itself.
Whereas the cash-cropping and SADM paradigms tended to see agricultural exports as the primary engine of growth in Africa, paradigms since the mid- 1980s have often been indifferent, sometimes even hostile, to agricultural exports as a means of development. More recently still, growth strategies based on shifting supply curves for agricultural tradables are making a comeback. In part, this is due to recent improvements in agricultural commodity prices; in part, it is because of growing awareness of the potential for household spending from increased smallholder-produced agricultural exports to stimulate demand-constrained rural
sectors.
Sustainable Development (SD)
The elements of a new paradigm began to be forged out of the interaction of two strategic concerns in the post-structural adjustment era: participation and natural resource conservation. This paradigm presently enjoys strong donor support for an identifiable set of actions consistent with the major tenets of participatory development and natural resource
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conservation. There is, however, considerable disagreement as to the appropriate conceptual framework for justifying those actions as a strategy for agricultural development.
The SD paradigm places great emphasis on the widespread degradation of the agricultural resource base in Africa and the relationship of such degradation to externalities.
The latter, such as the issues bound up with property rights and degradation of common land, show conflicts between a laissez-faire approach to market reform and sustainable development.
Much of the current work on developing the natural resource conservation side of the paradigm is directed to finding paths that reconcile natural resource conservation for future generations with immediate poverty alleviation goals.
The second pillar of the SD strategy is based on the premise that as the State withdraws from organizing rural economic life, a vacuum is left that is not fully filled by the "private sector," as it is generally conceived. In reality, many rural production activities, particularly new ones, require some form of organization not found in traditional societies, and individual merchants and joint stock companies are only two of the possibilities. There is, once again, tremendous interest in local organizations, grassroots organizations, and other forms of participatory mobilization of rural people. This interest has led to a new conceptualization of how the process of forming non-governmental organizations contributes to the agricultural (and non-agricultural) development process, based on the "new institutional economics".
This paradigm began to emerge at a time when the end of the Cold War occasioned less emphasis in donor circles on winning allegiances and more on securing compliance with what is felt by donors to be in the general interest of the development community. The emergence of the paradigm also corresponds to a period of relatively low world prices for agricultural commodities. This is perhaps reflected in the low priority given to increasing agricultural production in the donor countries at the present time, quite independent of whether African countries are likely to have the future import capacity to meet food needs. At the same time, the opening to the outside world of the former socialist countries has allowed everyone to see what can happen when environmental considerations are ignored.
Democratization and the Development of the Private Sector (DDPD)
In the first few decades after the demise of colonialism, most development strategies were based on ideologies that favoured the large-scale, capital- intensive public enterprise and showed little interest in developing agriculture or assisting the small farmer. That era gradually
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gave way to one in which private enterprise was championed, government regulation was opposed, and market forces were considered the best regulators of the economy. Throughout this post-colonial period, development strategy has been in tune with the changing political climate.
Privatization, too, has caused some concern, however, because it could bring unbridled power to large-scale multinational corporations. An alternative Ideological and power framework that has recently emerged is organized around small- and medium-scale private enterprises rooted in the domestic economy of developing countries. That strategy has its own ideological cohorts, some of whom take a conservative stance on distributive issues and market orientation.
Clearly, an agriculture-led strategy with its concomitant of vigorous growth in the small and medium rural enterprises breeds massive numbers of small entrepreneurs at a high rate.
That group, in turn, requires and encourages increasing market orientation. These two issues are treated at length in the case studies.
Another issue of concern here is the extent to which democratization includes rural people or is largely an urban phenomenon. A country with more than 50 percent of its population in rural areas is a restricted democracy indeed if it excludes rural people from its development plans. Perhaps because of their colonial background and the influence of the urban intelligentsia in the processes of decolonization, the governments of today's developing countries are more urban-based and less oriented to rural areas than was typical of countries that went through a similar stage of development earlier in their history, such as Japan and the countries of Europe and North America. That is why it is important to learn more about the implications of development for local government, co-operatives, and other democratic institutions in rural areas. The cases give little explicit attention to this issue, although their intensive coverage of rural institutions does shed some light on it, particularly in the exposition on Taiwan.
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m. PROJECT DESIGNS IN AFRICA FOR DEALING WITH AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
As is evident from the evolution of agricultural development paradigms in African, governments have, historically, employed the project approach to achieve their agricultural development objectives. There are two main reasons why the project approach has been the preferred strategy for investing in West African agriculture to achieve national agricultural development objectives. First, following independence, most countries of the sub-region drew up national development plans usually covering four to six years to establish guidelines for achieving the overall national growth-rate target. These plans typically included investment budgets broken down by sectors and based on certain assumptions and investment expectations for achieving the desired growth rate. Based on the overall national development plans, derivative sectoral plans were developed which included an array of programmes. The logical step for giving expression to these programmes at the micro-level was the identification, preparation, appraisal, and implementation of specific agricultural development projects.
A second reason why the project approach became very popular was because most aid- donors and international agencies placed considerable attention to immediate increases in agricultural production and felt that the approach provided a concrete way for making investments which could provide tangible flow of output over a specific period of time (Hirschman, 1967). The fact that most countries were operating from national development plans covering specific time-frames helped to reinforce the popularity of the project approach for dealing with the agricultural development projects of the sub-region.
Design Characteristics of the Main Project Classes
As implied in the preceding section, agricultural development projects were identified, prepared, appraised and implemented in the countries of West Africa primarily as an instrument of change to get the farmers in the sub-region to act in a pre-determined way which, it was expected, would result in increased agricultural growth. A number of common focal points can be identified for grouping the different agricultural development projects that have been implemented or are still being implemented in the sub-region. These include, but are not necessarily limited to the following:
1. Single crop development projects;
2. Free-standing projects for providing services such as credit, extension and marketing;
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I .__.
3. Integrated rural development projects;
4. Irrigation projects;
5. Rural schools and health facility projects
Single Crop Development Projects
Single crop development projects have their origins in the colonial period when agricultural administrators wanted to expand the export of specific cash crops as a way of boosting the foreign exchange earnings of the countries of the sub-region. Favourable terms of trade and improvements in world commodity prices encouraged the design and implementation of specific development projects for crops such as groundnuts, cotton, palm oil, rubber, tea, coffee and cocoa.
Several project designs were experimented with including large government owned plantations which produced and processed the specific crop in farms usually located on the plantation and/or nucleus farm schemes in which a parastatal company organized small farmers in surrounding villages to produce the specific crop which was then bought on a regular basis by the parastatal company at an agreed price. In return, the company provided logistic support to the farmers including crop specific research extension and credit.
Free-standing Logistics-Providing Projects
Interest in these free-standing logistics-providing projects was prompted by the recognition that logistic support for the agricultural sector was, in many cases, inadequate.
These projects were run and managed by the government, usually the ministry responsible for agricultural and/or livestock development. In most cases, they were provided through bigger rural and/or agricultural development projects. The typical services provided included:
agricultural research, extension, credit, marketing, and input supply.
Agricultural Research
The purpose of the agricultural research projects was to endeavour to produce a stream of new and improved agricultural technologies which were superior to what the small-scale traditional farmers were using. In most cases they involved the breeding of new seeds and new cultural practices involving purchased inputs and implements.
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Agricultural Extension
In most cases the agricultural extension projects were implemented by the ministries responsible for agricultural and/or livestock development or by parastatals supervised by these ministries. The typical extension project had an overall director at the national level supported by a layer of provincial and district directors, who in turn, supervise a number of field level extension staff. Project activities were invariably provided and financed by the government or donor agencies. Quite often, these projects were components of nation-wide or area agricultural development project.
Agricultural Credit Projects
These projects invariably involved funds made available from both the national banking system and the lending arms of parastatals agricultural credit institutions. They often involved subsidized lending.
Input Delivery Projects
The two most important inputs of the input-delivery projects are seed and fertilizers.
For seed, the projects were designed to involve plant breeding research, seed production and multiplication, processing, storage, marketing and distribution. Fertilizer projects were usually designed to procure and distribute fertilizers to farmers, quite often at highly subsidized rates.
Marketing
Marketing projects were usually managed and operated by government parastatals. The projects included marketing activities relating to economic functions which determine the values of agricultural commodities from stage to stage and which transferred ownership from one individual to the other. In most cases, the primary strategy was to pursue pan-territorial pricing.
Irrigation projects
Irrigation projects were conceived and designed to provide water for agricultural production in the arid and low rainfall areas of the sub-region. They invariably had a heavy
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engineering component and were usually larger-scale in size and scope. The strategy usually involved delivering water to the fields of the farmers but leaving the use and management of the water to the farmers themselves. In many cases they had service-providing components for research, extension, marketing and credit.
Rural Infrastructures Projects
Physical and rural infrastructural projects were conceived and implemented, usually by public agencies and under government control, in several countries as part of the basic needs agricultural development strategy of many West African countries. They included projects which provided water for household consumption, roads, schools, health facilities, marketing infrastructures, sanitation, and non-biomass energy. They were often characterized by lumpiness and were almost always provided free of charge.
IV. MEASURING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
PROJECTS
The Imperative to Measure Performance
There are many reasons why African governments and their development partners are increasingly calling for objective documentation of the performance of agricultural development projects. First, there is the imperative for governments to account for the use of public resources to the citizens of the country. Second, there is the desire to obtain information that can be used to underpin political support for the continued pursuit of the national agricultural development project approach. Thirdly, there is the imperative to learn from the lessons of past performance so that successful elements can be incorporated into the design and implementation of future projects and failure elements avoided.
Any objective measurement of the performance of agricultural development projects must first define the series of indicators that would be used in its measurement. Although the term "impact" is frequently used to gauge the outcome of agricultural projects, it implies so many complex and unmanageable connotations, that, its use is often unhelpful and sometimes meaningless. The term "performance", therefore, appears to be a more useful and manageable terminology as it provides a productive basis for assessing the efficacy of agricultural growth and development relative to project inputs that can best be addressed through a series of
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indicators. The assessment of these indicators has to however, be seen through the eyes of the key stakeholders. These include: the project beneficiaries, the implementation agencies, the agricultural administrators, the donor organizations, and other representatives of civil society at large.
When all is said and done, the driving imperative for measuring the performance of agricultural development projects is to determine in a comprehensive and objective way, the lasting contributions that the projects have made towards achieving the agricultural development goals of the country. The critical question to be asked and answered here is whether or not the project satisfactorily accomplishes the agricultural development objectives of the country, given the importance and relevance of its stated objectives and the associated costs and benefits. The measure of the overall performance of the project is the sum of the intended outcomes plus the unintended but associated outcomes. The intended outcomes are directly related to the project's stated goals and objectives. The associated outcomes reflect side effects and outcomes that can be reasonably attributed to the project. They are often unintended and can be negative.
To accurately capture both the intended and unintended outcomes of projects, the performance study must be able to assess the outcome of the projects as they affect the intended beneficiaries, the unintended losers, and other stakeholders. These assessment must also be carried out with their active involvement. This will require the identification and definition of a number of performance criteria.
Indicators for Measuring Performance
The study will employ a modified version of the indicators often used by the World Bank in monitoring and evaluating its rural development projects and in preparing its Implementation Completion Reports and its Performance Audit Reports (World Bank, 1981).
The following performance indicators will be used in the study:
1. Relevance 2. Effectiveness 3. Efficiency 4. Sustainability 5. Institution-building
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Relevance
1. Were the projects stated goals consistent with the country's overall agricultural development strategy?
2. Where the project's goal related to the development priorities of the agricultural sector?
3. Where the project's goals relevant to the priorities and needs of the primary beneficiaries?
Effectiveness
1. To what extent where the agricultural growth targets of the project achieved?
2. To what extent where the poverty reduction targets of the project achieved?
3. To what extent where the agricultural developments target of the project achieved?
Efficiency
1. Where the inputs into the project too much compared to its outcome?
2. Could more benefits for the beneficiaries be achieved had the resources put into the project been used for something else?
3. What is the gap between the actual and expected benefits of the project?
Sustainability
1. What is the likelihood that the project will maintain its performance in the future?
2. Are the macro-economic policies and assumptions on which the project is based in place?
3. To what extent did the performance of the project depend on exogenous factors such as the terms of trade or the political situation in neighbouring countries?
4. Can the project be self-sustaining and if not will it receive adequate budgetary funding in the future?
5. Are the technical requirements necessary to get the project going in place?
6. Does the community accept ownership of the project and participate in project activities freely?
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7. Does the project have any adverse effect on the environment and the renewable or non-renewable resources of the country?
8. Is there a supportive legal and regulatory framework with transparent application of rules and regulations to guarantee the accrual of project benefits to the intended beneficiaries?
Institutional Development
1. To what extent was the project able to improve the country's capacity to make effective use of the financial and human resources that were available to it?
2. What management administrative and legal changes were introduced and how did these changes affect the economic, social, and natural resource-use behaviour of the beneficiaries?
3. To what extent did the increased institutional capacity that come with the project increase the implementing agency's ability for planning, policy analysis, and service delivery.
Methodology for Measuring Performance
The most common methodology for measuring performance is an explicit intervention model that uses a logical framework to link project inputs to project outcomes and ultimately to performance. The basic methodological rule here is the "with and without project"
measurement criteria.
This rule is not, however, without its limitations. In practice it is often difficult to unambiguously define the "with and without" situations particularly when good baseline data at the onset of the project does not exist and an evaluation system for generating the needed information is not in place. This study will rely on sample surveys to generate the data needed to measure the performance of agricultural projects in West Africa. This will be complimented with additional data generated from the key stakeholders involved in the design and implementation of agricultural development projects in the sub-region.
There is no doubt that evaluating the performance of these projects will be complex.
Quantitative indicators can give some insights into the factors responsible for good performance or into factors that contribute to failure, but these indicators alone are not enough
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to give a complete and accurate picture. What is more, it is often difficult to isolate the effects of good project design and management from the effects of other factors such as macroeconomic and sectoral policies, institutional and infrastructure capacities, the organizational and management capacity of governments and the quality of the available natural resources. The success and failure elements of the performance of agricultural development projects in West Africa will, therefore, be evaluated in this study on a broader context of putting together a catalogue of insights based on the analyses of: the constraints and opportunities (missed or otherwise) encountered by the countries of the region in designing and implementing the projects reviewed; the mechanisms that were used to deal with these constraints and opportunities; and the effectiveness or otherwise of these mechanisms in improving the performance of the projects.
The aim here is not to use the catalogue of insights that emerge as a basis for sweeping generalizations since no general strategy can single-handedly capture the design and management solutions to the performance of agricultural development projects in West Africa.
Instead, the approach is to focus on insights into common problems and findings that can be used to leverage the design and management of better and more successful agricultural development projects in the future.
V. FACTORS AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL
DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
Several factors can affect the performance of agricultural development projects. They could be technical, economic, financial, social, or institutional. Exogenous factors over which no one has any control can also affect the performance of agricultural development projects.
Technical Factors
Technical factors influence the physical potential of the resources that are available to be used in the project. Many projects depend on technical changes which will result in more efficient use of inputs, increases in resource flows, or gains in productivity. They include physical and biological processes that have to be modified by the project beneficiaries or the project administrators.
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Economic Factors
Project performance is often dependent on the assumption that a number of economic policies and conditions will be in place or will be improved. They include policies such as the right macro-economic policy reforms, changes in world market conditions, and devaluation and exchange rate stability. These economic factors are often crucial to project success.
Financial Factors
Financial factors affect project success with respect to the availability and timing of funding. Adequate budgetary funding, financial conditionalities imposed by the funding agency and timely counterpart finding will all affect the performance of agricultural development projects. Related factors which influence project costs including the monetary and fiscal situation in the country can also influence the success of projects.
Social Factors
Agriculture is essentially a social activity in many West African countries. Agricultural development is a social process in which people in the rural area relate to one another in pursuit of the country's stated agricultural development goals. Social factors concerning how these rural people organize themselves and enter into economic production and exchange relationships will affect the performance of agricultural development projects. Some of these social factors include the structure of land holdings, the mode of labour organization and the structure of exchange relations. These factors will influence the level of community participation in the project as well as the distribution of project benefits.
Institutional Factors
Institutional factors, both public and private, directly or indirectly influence the way in which the economic and other services of the project will be provided by controlling, limiting, or liberating the action of the project beneficiaries. These institutional factors which operate not only at the project level but also at the general level, will determine how durable the delivery of the benefits accruing from the project will be. It will also determine the extent to which the intended beneficiaries of the project identify with its goals and claim ownership of
the project itself.
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Unpredictable Factors
Several exogenous factors over which the key stakeholders involved in the project have no control often affect the performance of agricultural development projects these include climate and natural disasters and civil disorders and armed conflicts. These factors may also help explain shortcomings in the performance of agricultural development projects.
VI. ORGANIZATION OF THE STUDY
The study will be carried out in two stages. Stage one will administer a comprehensive questionnaire in all of the countries of the sub-region. The survey will be designed to obtain operational insights into the different types of agricultural development projects in each country. After nearly two decades of operations many stakeholders in each country including government officials, political decision makers, private sector operators, and members of organized civil society have accumulated first hand impressions about the impact or lack of impact of the agricultural development projects in their countries and have arrived at calculated views on the performance of these projects. The survey administered during the first phase of the study is intended to capture these impressions and views and translate them into consistent sets of answers and operational insights.
Stage two of the study will involve detailed field work in six selected countries in the region (Nigeria, Ghana, Gambia, Cote d'lvoire, Burkina Faso and Senegal). The purpose of this stage of the study is to obtain more in-depth information and data on the performance of the projects in the targeted country. The starting point would be a systematic and comparative analysis of existing information in each of the six countries followed by a review of the overall state of knowledge and information on the operation and performance of the agricultural development projects. This will be followed by interviews with individuals with first hand experience in the design and management of the projects involved and interviews with the rural people who were targeted to benefit from the projects. Information and data will also be obtained from donor, government, and research agencies that have experiences with the design, implementation, supervision, and evaluation of the projects in the countries. The survey questionnaires that would be administered in the study are presented in annex I.
The results of the survey any concentrated field investigations will be complemented with substantial review of the literature on agricultural development in West Africa in particular and in Africa, in general, to support or oppose the operational insights obtained from the study.
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REFERENCES
Cleaver, K
1997 Rural development strategies for poverty reduction and environmental protection sub- Sharan Africa. Washington, D.C., The World Bank
Delgado C.
1995 Africa's changing agricultural development strategies: past and present paradigms as a guide to the future. Food, Agriculture and the Environment Discussion Paper Number 3. Washington, D.C., IFPRI.
Hirschman, A.
1967 Development projects observed. Technical Report, Washington, D.C., the Brookings Institute.
Staatz, J., T. Jayne, D. Tschiriey, J. Shaffer, J. Dione, J. Ochmke, and M. Weber
1993 Restructuring food systems to support a transformation of agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa: experience and issues. Staff Paper No. 93.36, East Lansing, Michigan Department of Agricultural Economics, Michigan State University.
World Bank
1981 (a) annual review of project performance audit reports. Washington, D.C., The World Bank
1981(b) A handbook on monitoring and evaluation of agricultural and rural development projects. Washington, D.C., The World Bank.
ANNEX I SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE (ENGLISH)
FOOD SECURITY AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT DIVISION/
WEST AFRICA SUB-REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT CENTRE UNITED NATIONS ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA
QUESTIONNAIRE TO COLLECT DATA ON THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS IN WEST AFRICA
PART I: RESPONDENT IDENTIFICATION
1. Name ofRespondent: 2. Title:
3. Fax No.: 4.Tel. No.: 5.E-mai!
6. Postal Address:
PART H. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS 7. For what country are you reporting
8. Which of the following categories of Agricultural Development Projects were most commonly found in the country during the last two decades? (Rank the types of projects from 1 to 5 with 1 being the most commonly found and 5 the least commonly found).
Integrated Rural Development Projects Single Crop Development projects
Agricultural Credit Projects CD
Free Standing Agricultural services Projects dl (Extensions agricultural research, input delivery) ,—.
Irrigation Projects
Rural school and health projects '—'
Part HI. THE LEVEL AND FACTORS AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE OF AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS.
9. How would you describe your role with regard to the type of agricultural development projects to which your response is most valid?
Project Management □
Government Agricultural Administration □
Policy Maker □
Financing Agency □
Aid Agency q
Beneficiary of the project r—i
10. For what type of Agricultural Development Project is your response most valid? (Tick only one for each set of questionnaire. The rest of your response on this questionnaire should focus on your experiences with this particular type of projects).
Integrated Rural Development Projects □
Single Crop Development Projects a
Free standing Agricultural Services Projects (Extension, Agricultural Research, etc.) □ Rural schools and health projects
Agricultural Credit Projects
11. What is the current implementation status of the projects in this category on which you are focusing your response? (You can tick more than one).
On-going with continued Donor/Government financial support I—^
On-going with full support by the beneficiaries Terminated/Abandoned
Other (Specify) □
12. Please answer the following questions concerning the performance of the specific category of projects you have chosen to focus on by circling your response given that:
SA = Strongly agree A = Agree U = Undecided D = Disagree SD = Strongly Disagree
A. RELEVANCE OF THE PROJECTS
(i) The goals of the projects were/are consistent with the
country's overall agricultural development needs. SA A U D SD (ii) Considering the relevance and importance of the
projects' stated objectives and their associated costs and benefits, most of the projects were
able to satisfactorily achieve the nation's agricultural
development goals.
(iii) The conceptualization and design of the projects were adequate.
(iv) Adequate monitoring and evaluation schemes were set up to ensure the achievement of the objectives
of the projects. SA A U D SD
(v) The funding agency supporting the projects
provided an objective and vigorous assessment of the projects before they were started.
(vi) The projects have had the support of the Government.
(vii) The projects have had the support and commitment of the affected communities and expected.
beneficiaries SA A U D SD
SA
SA A
A
U
U
D
D
SD
SD
SA SA
A A
U U
D D
SD SD
(viii) The terms of reference of the projects were clear and appropriate and were relevant to the priority agricultural development goals of the
country.
(ix) Project risks and project alternatives were adequately considered before the projects were started.
(x) Sufficient analysis and understanding of the agricultural development constraints
facing the country were undertaken, (xi) The projects had/has the political
commitment of the Government.
B. EFFECTIVENESS OF THE PROJECTS
The projects have been able to achieve the following:
(i) Most of their physical goals.
(ii) Most of their financial goals.
(iii) Most of their institutional goals.
(iv) Most of their policy related goals.
(v) Timely counterpart funding.
(vi) Well trained and experienced project personnel were made available.
(vii) Administrative procedures for procurement were clear, simple and transparent,
(viii) Measures were put in place to prevent avoidable cost increases.
(ix) The projects relied excessively on expatriate management which by-passed local management.
C. EFFICIENCY OF THE PROJECTS (i) The results of the projects in relation to their
costs were good,
(ii) The projects were implemented in a timely way.
(iii) Better results would have been obtained if the money spent on the projects were instead spent on other alternative projects.
(iv) Considering the projected costs and benefits of the initial investments in the projects, they were worthwhile.
(v) The provision of advise and supervision by the funding agency was adequate, (vi) The provision of advise and supervision by
government agricultural administrators were adequate.
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA SA SA SA SA
A A A A A
U U u u u
D D D D D
SD SD SD SD SD
SA A
SA A
SA A
SA A
u u
u U
D D D D
SD SD
SD SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
SA A U D SD
