Evaluation of the Senegal agricultural production support (APS) project

The evaluation covers the period 3/87-10/90. The project has shown very little progress. Of $9 million in planned credit, none has been extended. Seed certification, quality control, and promotional activities are concentrated in one region and on one crop (irrigated rice). Two of the five long-term TA positions remain unfilled due to disagreement about their roles. Only five of the projected nine host country personnel have been sent for long-term training. Only a few months of the proposed 58 months of short-term specialized TA have been provided -- none in the key areas of privatization strategy and policy formulation. These shortcomings are mainly due to a hasty and careless project design based on insufficient analysis and unverified assumptions and resulting in overly ambitious and unrealistic goals -- particularly concerning the project's nationwide geographic focus, its complexity, the timeframe envisioned, and the resources provided. More basically, the linkages between the project's components and the goal of increasing national cereal production were unjustified. Attainment of that goal depends in fact on several factors totally lacking in the project -- improved availability and quality of cereal seed varieties, distribution of seed to isolated areas, effective extension and demonstration support, and efficient processing technologies. Furthermore, the project's credit delivery mechanism (commercial banks) is unsuitable for the particular risks of lending to small and medium-scale agribusinesses and seed multiplication operations. Any such mechanism should accept more flexible guarantee requirements, have outreach and monitoring capabilities, and be guaranteed an interest spread higher than the project's 5-7%. Several lessons were learned. (1) Pressures to accelerate project design should be resisted. Proceeding with a project which is based on unverified assumptions can lead to a waste of project resources as fruitless activities are pursued or as resources are expended to validate assumptions and develop alternative strategies. (2) Project designers should resist including activities which, though otherwise useful, do not directly contribute to achieving the project's basic goals. (3) Clear lines of authority and responsibility must be established between any participating institutions and individuals. (4) Projects with multiple and diverse objectives and managing entities are extremely difficult to manage and require excessive time and effort to achieve effective results. (5) Privatization is not a panacea for public sector problems. (6) Private sector collaborators require attractive incentives, clear yet not overly restrictive guidelines, and more timely feedback than do public sector institutions. The project should be suspended and redesigned.