Rural Community Development Project - Gente de Valor, IFAD Impact Assessment Surveys 2019 (Brazil)

Abstract

As part of its greater portfolio in Northeast Brazil, IFAD supported the Brazilian government and State of Bahia to implement the Rural Communities Development Project in the Poorest Areas of the State of Bahia (PRODECAR), popularly referred to as Gente de Valor (GDV), between 2007 and 2013 .The purpose of GDV was to address the multitude of basic service gaps, empowerment deficit, and productive capacity needs experienced by residents of Brazil's Northeast region. Beneficiaries were drawn from the local population of sertanejos; a regional population named in reference to the dryland, sertão agro-climatic zone and among the poorest people in Brazil. As a CDD-style project, GDV's objective was to address their needs through a participatory process that would provide access to water-harvesting cisterns (primarily for household consumption), training on ecologically appropriate agricultural practices, technical assistance and technical inputs, as well as community capacitation to identify and address future development needs.

GDV was selected to be part of the IFAD10 Impact Assessment Agenda that consists of a broader set of impact assessments across the world. The aim is to generate evidence and provide lessons for better rural poverty reduction programs 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.

As almost six years having passed since the project closed, the analysis evaluates the sustainable impacts of GDV under the realm of access to infrastructure, agricultural productivity, poverty impacts, and empowerment of both women, youth and the community at large. Given the role that drought plays in affecting the economic opportunities of sertanejos, it is also relevant that this project evaluates outcomes following the recent multi-year drought. From the years 2010 to 2016, Bahia experienced a drought characterized as one of the worst of the century; affecting 33.4 million people and resulting in an estimated damage of approximately 30 billion USD (Marengo et al., 2017).

For more information, please, click on the following link <https://www.ifad.org/en/web/knowledge/-/publication/impact-assessment-g…;.