Impact assessment: Rural Development Support Programme in Guéra

Thw IFAD-funded Programme d'Appui au Développement Rural dans le Guéra (PADER-G) project was implemented with the main objective of supporting poor rural households and smallholder farmers in Guéra, Chad to improve their food security and livelihoods. One specific aim of PADER-G, designed to manage risks of food shortage, was to improve cereal storage among smallholder farmers through the construction of community cereal banks (banque de céréales). This main element of the project was complemented with the establishment of community committees (Comité de gestion des banques de soudure – COGES) which were trained on effective management of the cereal banks. This report documents results of an ex post impact assessment of the cereal banks element of PADER-G. The impact assessment was conducted between November 2017 and September 2018 and employed both qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods allow measuring impacts through the support of a narrative that both helps understand the meaning of results and yet it guides a more focused and cognizant IA design. The analysis of quantitative data collected from 2198 households (1066 beneficiaries and 1132 nonbeneficiaries) from 94 villages in 11 sous prefectures of Guéra was conducted by using a number of different approaches and propensity score matching methods which proved to provide robust estimates on the impacts of the PADER-G cereal banks intervention on several outcomes of interest, including food insecurity, resilience to drought and security shocks, dietary diversity, grain production (harvest), grain storage, post-harvest losses, and grain sales (market participation). Other areas of potential impact analyzed included social cohesions and women empowerment