ECONOMIC COMMISSION FOR AFRICA; EVALUATION AND NEEDS ASSESSMENT OF 1976-1979 GRANTS AGREEMENTS

This special contracted evaluation, attached to a PES of 1/81 (PD-AAG-346-B1), covers the period 6/76-7/79 and included interviews with ECA personnel. The major finding is that ECA"s great collaborative potential is being underutilized because of the low level of funding and the poor design/implementation of ECA projects. Although several projects have been successful (seven are recommended, with certain revisions, for continued funding), the impact of A.I.D. support on ECA programming and priorities has been minimal. Implementation of ECA projects has been hampered by ECA"s difficulty in recruiting qualified staff due to its slow and complex hiring policies and its location in troubled Ethiopia. ECA also lacks sufficient support and administrative services. Most ECA projects lack proper focus and utilize resources poorly. Project assumptions are often untested and no criteria exist for measuring achievement of outputs. To correct these design problems, A.I.D. personnel should be brought into the conceptualization and planning phases, and ECA should be granted direct access to A.I.D. decisionmakers. Most importantly, project impact has been damaged by the proliferation of proposals and donors, each with its own priorities and requirements. The resultant series of projects are unrelated and lacking in intra-agency cooperation. The ECA secretariat can provide only limited, ineffective leadership over this wide-ranging project area. Future funding must be highly structured, with individual donors concentrating upon selected areas to avoid multi-donor concentration in some areas and neglect in others. It is recommended that A.I.D./ECA design a regional development project prototype, limiting support to one development concept. A.I.D. should assist at the conceptual, planning, implementation, and evaluation phases, and should specify mechanisms for collaboration among ECA divisions. The project should follow the Lagos Plan for cooperative economic and agricultural development.