On Earth Day don’t count your chickens before they’re sustainable A donor funded a poultry program for a few years in several communities in Latin America. The goal was to increase revenues and improve protein intake. The program involved training, and the supply of starter capital; chickens and basic equipment for raising them. At the program’s end there were a significant number of community members who were engaged in chicken production both for family consumption, and for marketing and cash income. The project was deemed successful, at least to some degree. Some years later someone had the very good idea, an idea that is rarely implemented, of going back to see how the communities were doing; to undertake an ex post, impact evaluation. The evaluators dug back through the program reports, found out who was doing poultry at the end of the project and set off to talk to those people. To the evaluators chagrin, they found that almost none of the people, who were raising chickens at the end of the program, were still doing so. Almost none. In some places, none. The program was now deemed a failure. The initial success was unsustainable. The poultry program was deemed unsustainable. But then someone had another very good idea, an idea which is implemented even less often than doing an evaluation several years after the end of the project. Someone said “okay, no one is doing chickens any more, but what if we compared the communities who participated in the poultry program, to communities where there had been no program at all?” So, using datasets from independent and preexisting demographic and household surveys, the evaluators compared program communities to non-program communities in the same area and having similar socio-economic conditions. They found that program communities were systematically doing better than non-program communities (controlling for other factors to the extent possible) and that the differences were statistically significant. So then someone had another very good idea. Someone said “let’s go back to the communities, not to look for chickens as the first group had done, but to look for what the program might have done that meant that these communities were doing better”. What they appear to have found is that for technical and economic reasons, chickens were not the best fit in those communities; but that people who had participated in the program systematically used and applied that knowledge, skill and experience to undertake other types of activities, such as melon production and marketing. These activities were successful and contributing to community development. So the question is: do we still think the poultry program was unsustainable? The substance/content (chickens) was not sustainable, but the process may have been. And we need to focus on the right things when we think about sustainability. Sustainability may not be to achieve a steady state (endless chickens) but to initiate an evolving and adaptive process.
Also what if chickens led to higher value animals such as goats?
Country Representative at Relief and Recovery Sudan
2moThe goal of the project was to increase household income and protein intake. Chicken (poultry) was only the first vehicle the community boarderd to arrive at that destination which is increased household income and intake of protein. Th scenario showed the first vehicle the community boarded took the community to that destination. The later evaluations where looking at the wrong variable to measure sustainability. They went looking for chicken instead of household income and protein intake. I think the last group came up with the answers although not strongly because the tool they went with did not capture the information needed. In research one of the principles is the validity of the tool we use. If you go into the field looking for one thing and the tool you are using is asking questions on a different variable, we say the tool lacked validity. I think when assessing post program impact, we should measure the result not the means to achieve the result. If the household that participated in the program and increased their income during the program still have a stable income even through other projects that they started with the income from the first project, I would say that project is sustainable.