Sustained effects in development projects

Many development projects aim to make a difference and have an impact on the life of local citizens. Researchers and aid donors generally recognize the need for development projects to aim for sustained benefits of their project interventions. This is particularly important for agricultural projects. In many developing countries in Africa, the agricultural sector employs a large number of the population. Moreover, increasement of agricultural production can lead to food security in that country and more exports, which can generate incomes for local farmers. With aid donors laying more focus on sustaining project benefits, one would think that they will fulfil the criteria of sustainability when executing and completing their work. Literature has been written about criteria project developers should take into account when designing and executing projects, however not much attention has been brought to what extend project developers do take the criteria for sustainability in mind when designing, implementing and finishing their projects and which factors are necessary for sustained benefits. Therefore, this research answered the following research question: ‘To what extent are the criteria for project sustainability derived from literature important for the expected sustainability of agricultural development projects?’. This is done by conducting a case study and assessing ten agricultural development projects by use of a conceptual framework, which included twelve factors that are important for sustained benefits of agricultural projects. The results indicate that agricultural development projects can be expected to have sustained benefits if they include factors of the conceptual framework in the projects that are found to be necessary. Those factors are: capacity of local stakeholder; existing policies and policy support; M&E during project implementation; and no harm to environment. Other factors from the conceptual framework can contribute to sustained benefits but are not necessary. For project developers one could see trade-offs between factors were made: none of the projects did involve all factors from the conceptual framework. One finding of this study was that, even though there is much emphasis in both literature as well as in the projects themselves on capacity building, some projects still failed to achieve the desired level of capacity of local stakeholders by the end of the project. Therefore, a recommendation for future research is to research why this is, so project developers and executors can overcome this capacity problem in future projects. This can help to increase the number of agricultural development projects with sustained benefits. Based on the finding of this study future research could also asses why few projects continue monitoring and evaluation activities after project activities stopped, and what the impact is of not continuing those activities on the sustained benefits of those projects.