Measuring impact in rural Vietnam: IFAD tests a new approach

Children walk to school in Hoang Su Phi, Viet Nam, in 2002.
Since then, the country has halved poverty overall.

Viet Nam has come a long way since its days as a net importer of food in the early 1980s. Today, following decades of robust growth, it is the world’s second largest exporter of rice. In the past 10 years alone, according to World Bank statistics, it has also halved the proportion of its population living in poverty. Yet inequities persist, especially in remote rural regions where many of the country’s ethnic minority groups live. IFAD continues to support five projects in these areas, working with smallholder farmers to reduce poverty through sustainable agricultural development.

This past week, staff and partners from the IFAD country office in Hanoi joined colleagues at headquarters in Rome by video link. They convened to discuss a newly expanded approach to monitoring and evaluating the impact of IFAD-supported projects in Viet Nam. It was the third in a series of research seminars co-sponsored by IFAD and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), which has collaborated, as well, on developing this new approach.

The discussion was not without controversy. Still, there was a tangible sense of urgency, on all sides, about stepping up IFAD’s ability to accurately measure results on the ground – not only in Viet Nam but worldwide.

Ambitious target
Thomas Elhaut, IFAD’s Director of Statistics and Studies for Development, moderated the seminar. He began by placing the Viet Nam experience in a broader context: namely, the ambitious target set during the latest replenishment of funding from IFAD member states. The target calls for lifting 80 million rural people out of poverty by 2015.

Without improved evaluation, Elhaut suggested, IFAD will not have the evidence base to design and implement projects that can help reduce poverty on such as large scale. Nor, in the end, will it have the data to credibly report on progress toward the goal of 80 million.

From Hanoi, Atsuko Toda of IFAD and Nicholas Minot of IFPRI went on to describe the approach being tested in Viet Nam and why, in their view, it may hold promise for other countries. The methodology builds upon IFAD’s existing results and impact management system, or RIMS, which has been in use since 2003. By expanding the standardized RIMS household survey, this approach – dubbed “RIMS-plus” – aims to capture more detailed data that is relevant to specific project aims. In another innovation, it uses a control group of households, located outside the target area, to better assess which results are attributable to a project.

Additional indicators
Toda noted that the expanded questionnaire goes beyond the main objectives of the RIMS survey, which were to measure household assets and child nutrition. The RIMS-plus survey, she said, collects information on many additional indicators to diagnose constraints faced by farmers, including limits on access to rural markets, extension services and credit.

Minot added that the designers of the expanded questionnaire have still kept it relatively brief compared to most other household surveys; as a result, it should not overburden either enumerators or respondents.

Regarding the control groups, Minot explained that they would be selected from populations who live near project areas and whose backgrounds and economic status are similar to those of project beneficiaries. “It helps us to adjust for changes in the standard of living outside the project area,” he said. For example, a drought in the same province where a project is under way could cause an overall drop in rural incomes, which would have to be factored into any analysis of the project’s impact.

A third participant in the video link, Nguyen Ngoc Ahn of the Hanoi-based Development and Policies Research Centre, outlined the cost implications of both the extended questionnaire and the use of control groups. The questionnaire increases the amount of time needed to complete each survey and the training needed by enumerators, he said. The control groups add 300 households to the standard RIMS sample of 900 for large projects.

Costs of customization
At this point, some sceptical voices in the audience at IFAD headquarters questioned whether the new methodology’s value justified its added expense. Specifically, they asked whether the control groups could truly mirror the beneficiary households, given the complexities of rural poverty – including gender dynamics. In addition, they wondered whether the benefits of customized household surveys (more project-specific information) outweighed the advantages of standardized questionnaires (lower cost and consistent data across multiple projects).

In response, Toda noted that some of the expenses in Viet Nam represented the one-time cost of researching and developing a new evaluation tool. And while Minot acknowledged that the control groups could not match every household parameter, he maintained that they would provide valuable comparisons with project beneficiaries nonetheless.

On the question of standardized vs. customized surveys, Minot proposed a compromise: “We can use standardized modules but let each country decide which modules are most relevant for them,” he said. Such an arrangement would allow for a degree of customization without adding excessively to costs, he said.

As the seminar wrapped up, Thomas Elhaut praised the presenters in Hanoi for advancing IFAD’s thinking on the design and analysis of agricultural projects, even as various questions remain to be resolved. To some extent, those questions will be answered as the RIMS-plus experiment proceeds in the uplands and deltas of rural Viet Nam, where smallholder farmers need the tools to build a sustainable future.

Watch the recorded webcast of the IFAD-IFPRI seminar:

Beyond the Arab Awakening: Food security and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa

As popular discontent swept across much of the Arab world over the past year, some observers were puzzled. “How is it,” asked the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011, “that countries in the Middle East and North Africa could face explosions of popular grievances despite, in some cases, sustained high growth and improvement in social indicators?”

Last week, experts from IFAD and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) took a stab at answering that question in a panel discussion at IFAD headquarters in Rome. Their observations were based on early results from a three-year research project, co-funded by IFAD and IFPRI, examining the nexus of rural development, food security and conflict.

The study’s initial phase covers 24 “Arab-plus” nations, comprising all the members of the Arab League plus Iran and Turkey. The panellists emphasized that it is a work in progress and said the presentation was, in part, an opportunity to solicit feedback from colleagues who brought their own expertise to the table.

Those caveats aside, the researchers’ preliminary conclusions were provocative. While conditions vary from country to country, they said, indicators of well-being in the region are not as positive as official figures suggest. What’s more, Arab nations may be exceptionally vulnerable to conflicts associated with food insecurity and poverty.

A proxy for poverty
Given the severe rates of youth unemployment and rising commodity prices in many Arab states, there’s little doubt that economic grievances triggered at least some of the unrest they’ve experienced. Yet the official statistics issued by governments show a steady decline in poverty amidst economic growth.

At the panel discussion, IFPRI research analyst Perrihan Al-Riffai presented evidence that the government data may be flawed and incomplete. To set an accurate baseline for analysis, she explained, the IFPRI researchers have selected a proxy for official poverty figures. Rather than income, they’re looking at the rate of stunting among children under five – because stunting is a clear marker for vulnerability and food insecurity at the household level.

“The nutritional indicator is more comprehensive than the poverty indicator,” said Al-Riffai. “It really paints a different picture. When we plot the nutrition-growth relationship, we find that the Arab-plus countries are not doing as well as the rest of the world in reducing poverty through economic growth.”

This analysis matters, Al-Riffai and other panellists argued, because reliable data provide the only sound basis for evidence-based budget and policy decisions that will reduce poverty and promote stability.

Risk of food insecurity
The figures on child stunting also shed new light on food insecurity in the Arab world. Based on the proportion of revenues that each country spends to import food, the researchers found that the risk of food insecurity ranges from “low” to “serious” across the region. When the child-nutrition data are factored in, however, the risk shifts toward “alarming.”

Three countries in the Horn of Africa – Sudan, Somalia and Yemen – are among those registering the highest risk. And the rural poor are the most vulnerable population overall.

As IFPRI senior researcher Clemens Breisinger pointed out, investments in agriculture usually reduce poverty more cost-effectively than any other form of development. Yet smallholder farming has not thrived in the Arab-plus countries. In fact, farming is no longer the main source of income for the region’s poorest rural households, who now earn more than 80 per cent of their income from non-agricultural activities.

“Agriculture is globally the most pro-poor sector, but not in the Arab world,” said IFPRI senior researcher Clemens Breisinger. “There are some serious issues of growth not reaching the poor.”

Links to conflict
Another panellist, IFPRI senior researcher Jean-François Maystadt, went on to highlight some of the links between lagging agricultural development and conflict.

In general, said Maystadt, periods of political transition heighten the risk of violence between groups within a society, and recent events around the Middle East and North Africa surely seem to verify that point. More broadly, he said, the Arab world faces an ongoing risk of conflict stemming from myriad factors. These include weak institutions and a demographic ”youth bubble,” as well as dependency on oil exports for foreign exchange.

In some places – such as Somalia, the subject of a case study by the research team – climate change also fosters conflict by depriving rural populations of their traditional livelihoods.

But in many Arab countries, the disconnect between overall economic growth and persistent rural poverty may be the most inflammatory factor of all. “Rising food prices increase food insecurity,” said Maystadt, “and this increases the risk of conflict.”

Basis for investments
These finding suggest that a broad-based approach to food security, focused not only on agricultural development but also on stimulating the wider rural economy, could mitigate the risk of future conflicts in Arab nations. More study is needed to determine which policies will have the greatest impact.

To that end, the IFAD-IFPRI project team will supplement its initial research with visits to IFAD programmes and interviews in the field. In addition, the team will use its newly developed Atlas for Rural Development and Conflict, a comprehensive digital database, for further analysis and modelling. Their on-going work will concentrate mainly on Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen.

Ultimately, the goal of the research project is more practical than academic. “It will give us a more quantified and empirical basis for our investments,” said IFAD Country Programme Manager Omer Zafar. Over time, informed by solid research, those investments should make a real difference in rural lives across the Arab world.

• Missed the presentation? Watch the recording
• Video interview with Perrihan Al-Riffai, IFPRI research analyst
• Video interview with Jean-François Maystadt, IFPRI senior researcher
• Powerpoint presentation