Support Program for Rural Development in the Guéra, IFAD Impact Assessment Surveys 2017

Smallholder farmers in developing countries often lack appropriate cereal storage facilities which can contribute to food insecurity and low cereal commercialization, particularly when they can only rely on one cropping season with no irrigation. Lack of quality storage can lead to post-harvest losses (Abass et al, 2014; Sheahan and Barrett, 2017) and often compels smallholder farmers to sell their crops soon after harvest, when crop prices are at their seasonal lowest, only for them to buy grain for consumption during the lean season, when prices are high (Kadjo et al, 2018; Aggarwal et al, 2018; Stephens and Barrett, 2011). In many instances, such farmers need food assistance to survive the lean season and in other cases, they may have to borrow money at usurious rates in order to purchase food. This was the case in Guéra Region of Chad, a semi-arid area that frequently experiences droughts and dry spells in ways that severely reduce crop production and rural households’ food security.

To address these issues, the 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 data refer to the ex-post impact assessment of the PADER-G community cereal banks intervention. The impact assessment employed various methods, which proved robust across a number of estimated impacts. The inverse-probability-weighted matching techniques on household data collected from villages that benefited from the community cereal banks (the treatment) and villages that did not benefit from the PADER-G cereal banks (the control) were used for the main report, however additional results are available in the appendix. The inverse-probability-weighted regression-adjustment (IPWRA) and other variants of matching techniques were used to assess the impact of PADER-G cereal bank interventions on several outcome and impact indicators, including household income, assets, food security, dietary diversity and resilience indicators. Other similar estimators used to check for consistency of results include the augmented inverse-probability-weighting (AIPW) and entropy balancing methods.

The PADER-G cereal banks intervention was selected as an ex-post impact assessments to be part of the IFAD10 Impact Assessment Agenda (IFAD10 IAA) that consists of a broader set of impact assessments across the world. The aim of IFAD10 IAA is to generate evidence and provide lessons for better rural poverty reduction programmes and to measure the impact of IFAD-supported programmes on enhancing rural people's economic mobility, increased agricultural productive capacity, improved market participation and increased resilience. In undertaking this impact assessment, IFAD endeavours to fill key knowledge gaps on the impacts of community cereal banks in rural areas of developing countries, an intervention that has received less attention from impact evaluators.

For more information, please, click on the following link https://www.ifad.org/en/web/knowledge/-/publication/impact-assessment-rural-development-support-programme-in-guera .