Jamaica feeder roads : an evaluation

This report investigates the causes of that failure by examining the logic, appropriateness, and achievement of the project"s goals. It was planned that road improvement would generate rural employment and help to stabilize the political climate. Furthermore, the roads were to facilitate market access, thereby stimulating increased agricultural production and income for small farmers. However, A.I.D. made a fundamentally illogical decision in relying on a feeder roads project as means to these goals. The projected labor-based construction mode was never actively pursued either by contractors or by the implementing agency and no significant employment was generated. Even had rural employment increased, the authors show that each step in the planned chain of events -- decrease in migration and urban crime, increase in tourism, and political stabilization -- was only loosely linked to the preceding condition, making their achievement highly unlikely. From the developmental perspective, the project neither lowered transport costs nor increased land under cultivation, once again because of a flawed program logic. The project also had limited (even adverse) social, environmental, and institutional effects. It demonstrated the inadvisability of relying on central departments to implement labor-based construction and the need to consider rural roads projects as a part of integrated rural development, not as isolated infrastructure. The authors conclude that the haste brought about by the project"s high political priority ultimately caused its failure. A more methodical design and review process would have revealed the ineffectiveness of the rural roads approach and its propensity for failure. These conclusions are particularly important since politically-oriented foreign assistance from any source could encourage repetition of similar difficulties. Detailed project strategies and economic, social, environmental, institutional, and engineering analyses are attached.