Evaluating Impacts of Formalization of Water Right for Agriculture Use 2011

A group of three representative valleys - Andahuaylas, Huamachuco, and Tarma - were selected for the evaluation. These locations were chosen due to their propensity to suffer from droughts, thus making the access to water more important. Researchers focused on valleys with a critical mass of irrigation blocks and that have not received PROFODUA yet. An irrigation block has an average of 400 water users, but this number varies from one block to another. Assuming that there are 80 blocks in a given valley, physical and human capacity constraints limit the implementation of the program to at most 20 blocks per year. Inevitably, it will take four years to serve all the properties in the valley. The identification strategy consists of using a lottery to randomly distribute the blocks into four different groups. Each group will receive the intervention in a different year where the individuals intervened in the fourth year will serve as a control group for those reached in the first year.

To obtain preliminary results on the potential effects of the program, an "external" group was selected to be part of the baseline survey. This external group was comprised by a valley, Huaraz, that was partially intervened. A sample of those blocks that already benefited from the program will be matched to those blocks that were not exposed to the intervention. These intermediate results will serve as a first approximate reference of the "potential" impact of the intervention.

The survey was divided into two stages: initially, the interviews were conducted for the Treatment Group regions in Andahuaylas, Huamachuco, and Tarma, and the program designers sought to interview 1,607 households. As for the Control Group of Huaraz, 401 households were interviewed. The survey includes information for 2,008 households (7,325 individuals).