PESPIRE VALLEY INTEGRATED DEVELOPMENT

This evaluation covers the period 7/77-6/80 and was conducted by a private, non-profit Honduran institution, Instituto de Investigacion y Formacion Cooperativista. The report is based on project documents and interviews with project personnel and beneficiaries. The project was terminated in 9/80. Project technical activities were not successful due to low quality personnel, lack of planning and coordination, and poor selection of activities. The project was too amibitious in terms of both the number of activities and the size of the project area. Save the Children Federation (SCF), the implementing agency, had neither sufficient funds nor the experience to implement a multi-faceted project such as this one. Because the project was not seriously evaluated as it was being implemented, the opportunity to make mid-course changes was lost. Overall, project experience demonstrated that projects -- even those implemented by PVO"s -- simply cannot work without adequate technical and administrative capabilities behind them. Careful assessment of the capabilities of the beneficiary group must be made. The SFC essentially became a patron of the Pespire area. Independence and responsibility were limited to very few local people. Because the Pespire Valley has a high illiteracy rate, the attempt by this project to impose a cooperative system without intensive preliminary educational inputs was doomed to fail. Furthermore, the SCF"s project plan did not identify any specific or general role the community cooperative would play; it failed to give the cooperative greater independence and responsibility during the life of the project; and it did not identify the legal and economic procedures necessary to its success. Distribution of expenditures were as follows: salaries and personnel - 38%, transport - 10%, cooperative projects and loans - 34%, training - 18%.