The aim of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s Compact with Armenia (“the
Compact”), a five-year agreement signed in March 2006, was to increase household income and
reduce poverty in rural Armenia through improved performance of the country’s agricultural
sector. The Compact, managed by the Millennium Challenge Account with Armenia (MCAArmenia),
was originally designed to include two projects: (1) the Rehabilitation of Rural Roads
Project and (2) the Irrigated Agriculture Project.0F
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The Irrigated Agriculture Project comprised
two complementary activities, the rehabilitation of irrigation infrastructure (“the Irrigation
Infrastructure Activity,” hereafter, Infrastructure Activity) and the provision of training,
technical assistance, and access to credit for farms and agribusiness (“the Water-to-Market
Activity”).
The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) has commissioned rigorous impact
evaluations to examine each of the three main activities of the MCA-Armenia program. This
report focuses on the evaluation plans for the Infrastructure Activity. The Infrastructure Activity
was completed near the end of the Compact in 2011 and is the final of the three evaluations
MCC commissioned. The Rehabilitation of Rural Roads Project and the Water-to-Market
Activity of the Compact were evaluated previously (Fortson et al. 2015; Fortson et al. 2013). The
data used in the Infrastructure Activity evaluation cover the 2013 agricultural season, so the
evaluation will examine effects two to three years after completion of the infrastructure work.
In addition to evaluating the Infrastructure Activity itself, we will also present a simple
check on the potential for complementarities between the irrigation infrastructure rehabilitation
and select components of the Water-to-Market Activity that were evaluated before the
rehabilitation had been completed. We focus on two components of the Water-to-Market
Activity that were designed to have particularly strong complementarities with the rehabilitated
infrastructure, the Institutional Strengthening Subactivity and Water-to-Market training