Managing development programs : management strategies and project interventions in six African agricultural projects

A total of 51 lessons learned are presented. Recommended strategies for project managers are to use informal means of persuasion before formal action and to delegate management so as to provide room for leadership. The manager should recognize tradeoffs between simple, clear project goals and more general and flexible ones and adapt goals to new information or local conditions. To establish linkages with other governmental levels, the manager should set up a professional unit to coordinate supplies, delegate responsibilities to local managers (and provide them both logistical and informal support), and give other agency personnel a voice in planning and a stake in the results. Strategies are also suggested for personnel, financial, and information systems and for relating projects to their environment. Program agencies (i.e., in the projects examined, Ministries of Agriculture) should set up autonomous units to manage projects, establish broad and multiple goals to facilitate coordination, provide services to local units, adopt a planning/control system that decentralizes some planning functions without losing control, experiment with computerized monitoring and regular reports, approach planning as a series of steps, and channel data directly to decisionmakers. Finally, efforts to improve host institutions" capacities to design and manage development projects should analyze existing management strengths and weaknesses, anticipate how the project will affect these, design an appropriate management strategy (if enough information is available to do so), encourage managers to learn and adapt (allowing a long timeframe), and encourage the institutions to plan for long-term project sustainability.