Irrigation and Drainage Sector, On-Farm and Minor Irrigation Networks Improvement, and Agricultural
11 junio 2007The World Bank Group
Project Performance Assessment Report
July, 2005
The audit gives mixed results regarding the three projects, for although it concurs with the Implementation Completion Report ‘ s (ICR) ratings for the On-Farm and Minor Irrigation Networks Improvement Project of a satisfactory project outcome, likely sustainability, and substantial institutional development impacts, concerning the Irrigation and Drainage Sector Project the audit downgrades its project outcome to satisfactory, and sustainability to likely, but concurs on substantial institutional development impacts; and, regarding the Agricultural Productivity Improvement Project, the audit also downgrades its project outcome to unsatisfactory, sustainability to unlikely, and institutional development impacts to negligible.
The assessment confirms the following OED lessons of broader relevance. Projects need to dovetail with programs; but well-designed projects can rarely turn around a poorly-designed program. This is a particularly important lesson for the Bank ‘ s work in Mexico where leverage is limited. Mexico has ample access to alternative sources of funding, private as well as public. In line with the Bank ‘ s poverty reduction mandate, its resources should be tightly targeted, rather than added to programs where there is a high potential for subsidies to be captured by better-off groups.
The Bank ‘ s leverage may be substantially diluted when project funds flow into a multi-state program which state governments have considerable influence over the use to which resources are put. Large Programs are candidates for formal impact evaluation. In this case, the main limitation of the Alianza evaluation was the absence of a control group of non-beneficiaries, a striking oversight given the level of funding committed. The evaluation should have sampled those who did not apply to the program; and those who did but were rejected. (It is not clear that a list of the rejected is maintained.) Without this control it is impossible to assess claims about the program ‘ s leverage: much of the investment (and the income growth attributed to it) might have occurred without a subsidy. Subsidies may have leaked to better-off groups who don ‘ t need them.
