Strategic evaluation of the food security programs of four cooperating sponsors in Peru under Public Law 480 Title II

480) assistance activities of four cooperating sponsors in Peru for the period 1996-99: Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA), CARE, Caritas, and Prisma. Activities were carried out in the areas of health and nutrition, agriculture and productive investment, and microcredit. The cooperating sponsors have been ambitious and dedicated in carrying out food security programs and have generally met projected outputs, e.g., numbers of children vaccinated, or hectares of small-farmer production planted using improved seed varieties. However, they have not collected information on intermediate results that can be used to assess program impact, nor disaggregated budget data for evaluation of cost-effectiveness. Also, concerns about may be raised about the sustainability of the results achieved in some programs of all four sponsors. At the financial level, international cooperating sponsors demonstrated significantly higher administrative costs than did those of local cooperating sponsors. Leveraging added more than 56% to the total amounts of Title II assistance monetized during the reporting period. Findings regarding economic cost-effectiveness were as follows: (1) Health and nutrition programs should focus increasingly on training in basic good practices and the institutional strengthening of and collaboration with public sector institutions that eventually will take over integral health programs. (2) Organizational strengthening of small-firm economic associations should emphasize business skills, quality control, cost-sharing, and establishing strong business linkages. (3) Agricultural production assistance activities should always be based on market signals and demand, and in particular should rely on and incorporate strategic marketing approaches. (4) Investments in public infrastructure, from rural access roads to canals and irrigation systems, are problematic in terms of sustainability. Unless concrete mechanisms are in place for the self-financing of future operations and maintenance, they should be phased out of the P.L. 480 portfolio, and a concerted effort made to encourage their adoption by responsible public authorities. (5) Rural microcredit activities remain unproven. Following a defined period of 18-24 additional months, microcredit activities in rural areas should be reviewed to see whether they should continue to be financed by the program. In other areas, concern remains about the effectiveness of the Government of Peru"s food distribution activities. Several reports allege that extreme poverty in rural areas of lesser political or economic importance is not receiving the attention it deserves. Concerns about contracting out could be mitigated if responsibility for implementing the programs were contracted out on a competitive basis to NGOs. This could also leverage considerable resources to help ensure impact sustainability. Finally, the cooperating sponsors need to begin tracking such intermediate results as increases in agricultural yields, production, and sales, as well as to track microcredit activity performance by type of client in order to better establish the impact of their programs. (Author abstract, modified)