There is an urgent need for new approaches and effective models for managing risk and promoting sustainable development in arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs), especially in the face of climate change and increasing frequency of drought in many areas.
This study assesses the impacts of the Arid Lands Resource Management Project (ALRMPII), a community-based drought management initiative implemented in 28 arid and semi-arid districts in Kenya from 2003 to 2010. The project sought to improve the effectiveness of emergency drought response while at the same time reducing vulnerability, empowering local communities, and raising the profile of ASALs in national policies and institutions.
Some more general recommendations based on the findings of this evaluation and on the mlessons learned in undertaking it are:
ALRMPII appears to have played an important coordination role in the districts. The project may want to consider making this an explicit objective in the future, and include a Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure the impact. Similarly, the main indicator of community-level impact was service provision, however if the objective of participation in community-level projects—whether for infrastructure, service provision, natural resource management, or income-generation—also includes building capacity and demonstrating alternative models of working with communities, then an alternative specification of the indicator that captures changes in community capacity and empowerment would be appropriate.
There were no KPIs around environmental impacts in ALRMPII, however there are several reasons why it might be useful to put more effort into documenting these in the future. First, changes in the quality and availability of natural resources could be important causal mechanisms through which project interventions impact on poverty and vulnerability. Second, environmental indicators would also be a necessary part of understanding the impacts of climate change and the potential impacts of interventions around adaptation or mitigation, issues which are likely to be important in the ASAL regions in the future.
In terms of evaluation methodology, the project had substantial baseline data available which facilitated the evaluation, however there are several ways in which the evaluation framework could be strengthened. More attention to specifying impact pathways would improve understanding of the causal mechanisms by which project interventions may have influenced observed outcomes. In addition, the ability to attribute observed changes to project activities would be improved through the development of a clear framework for site selection and classification that can guide project implementation as well as evaluation.