USAID/Bangladesh : project assistance completion report -- food for work III

The project was implemented by CARE/Bangladesh. Originally intended for 5 years, the project was extended four times for an overall life of 9 years. In all, the project: (1) distributed almost 621 MTs of P.L. 480 wheat as direct in-kind wages directly benefiting 375,000 workers and their dependents annually; (2) generated 134.5 million of a targeted 240 million person-days of employment; (3) rehabilitated 96,882 km of rural roads and 9,910 small and large bridges/culverts (vs. respective targets of 86,400 and 10,553); (4) provided on-the-job training of small and medium-level construction contractors and architecture and engineering firms; and (5) provided training to 14,000 Government of Bangladesh (BDG) thana officials and union representatives in scheme preparation, implementation, monitoring, disaster management, and environmental orientation. The project also established a rigorous system to account for project resources and funded training of CARE staff in disaster preparedness and disaster response management. Despite these accomplishments, the project failed to fully realize its development potential. Although project reviews demonstrated that properly sited and fully bridged rural roads can yield economic benefits to the rural poor, many FFW roads were poorly sited, poorly constructed, and lacked adequate or appropriate drainage structures, thereby creating water logging and disrupting fish migration patterns. FFW earthen roads lacked a provision for maintenance, making them subject to seasonal monsoon rains. These problems in part from the inability of the Relief Ministry, the implementing agency, to fully support the project"s emphasis on development rather than relief. But poor implementation by local officials was also to blame. As a result of the latter, only 66% of the construction activities, which were initially funded by the BDG under a reimbursement scheme, were actually reimbursed by CARE. Problems included failure to comply with guidelines, work left incomplete, unauthorized expenditures, and unsatisfactory planning by thanas. The following lessons were learned. (1) The project created environmental problems by constructing numerous roads on the Bangladesh deltaic flood plain where heavy monsoon rains cause frequent floods. Some farmers with land adjacent to the roads lost land and were not compensated. (2) It is difficult to produce durable earthen roads. Attaining the desired compaction is not cost-effective for large-scale rural road construction all over the country, but hand construction results in washouts during monsoons. To address this problem, turfing and vegetation should be included in road rehabilitation. (3) Wheat distribution yielded some relief, including temporary employment and nutritional and income benefit, to the rural poor. However, even though the most vulnerable poor are women of child-bearing age, only 2% of workers in the earth moving activity were women. In addition, FFW work activities were conducted during the dry season, not during the pre-harvest months of July through October, when the need for food supplements is most acute. (4) Maintenance and repair of infrastructure is a critical sustainability issue. Under the Integrated Food for Development (IFFD) project, CARE plans to undertake action research pilots to find ways for local government to raise money to repair and maintain rural infrastructure.