Evaluering
Final Evaluation Report for Longchuan and Moshui Integrated Community Development Project, Yunnan, P.R. China
Purpose/objective: Buer Kunming office, as the representative of NMA, is preparing to apply for a new 5-year project period in Longchuan. The overall purpose of this evaluation is to summarize and assess the major achievements of NMA projects and identify important lessons in order to inform and improve future planning. Executive Summary Following literature and document analysis of Norwegian Mission Alliance (NMA) projects and a seven-day onsite evaluation trip, the evaluation team interviewed administrative partners at various levels, major stakeholders and participating villagers in Lvliang and Moshui villages. This report addresses many general and specific concerns of NMA projects, including output analysis, government policy background, community based evaluation and project execution. This report also examines some of the project details from such aspects as national government policy, regional political structure, sociological traits and administrative levels. From this analysis and field assessments, we attempt to review the efficacy of projects in Longchuan, and contribute possible new suggestions for future development (five-year plan) in this region. Over the past four years, NMA has conducted extensive programs at the local village level, including education, public health, agricultural development, infrastructure, community organization capability building, and women’s development. In Longchuan county’s Lvliang and Moshui villages, all together 53 projects have been conducted, focused respectively on education sponsorship (9 programs), infrastructure building (19 programs) and villagers’ training (18 programs), with 2,589,800 RMB in total funding. Among them, 13 projects deal with agricultural development, including skills training, biogas facility construction, water transfer and remodeling of animal raising farms; 16 projects deal with education, including student allowance, vocational training, and improvement of education facilities; 12 projects deal with public health at the village level, including public toilets, garbage storage, drinking water facilities, construction of a village clinic room and medical training; 4 health improvement projects concern a specific group of women (assisting this group with regular health checks and medical knowledge training). Our evaluation found that except for some failed attempts with vocational training and micro loan projects (due to policy hurdles and understaffing), most of the projects have realized their specific targets. The education sponsorship has greatly improved local students’ nutritional and educational status, with significant improvements in morale building and academic achievements. By investing in public facilities and infrastructure, local villages have considerably improved their natural environment, especially public hygiene. Regular physical checks for children and women, especially village nursery clinics, have laid the ground for further achievements concerning physical health improvements for villagers. Agricultural training for sugarcane planting and manure composting has provided new opportunities for income generating skills. At the same time, the project execution and administrative capabilities of villagers have also improved accordingly. However, we also found some limits among these projects. For brevity, they are listed as follows: In general, participants of these projects failed to take into account some basic national characteristics, as exemplified by sociological power mechanisms and social logic in Chinese contexts. Before the launch of these projects, there appeared to be few efforts to conduct baseline surveys regarding the socio-cultural characteristics and specific cultural situation that is found in this region. These projects, generally speaking, lack a clear structural design from a macro and strategic level, and accordingly failed to address a holistic design based on regional, ethnic and social development issues, as well as the government’s needs, natural environment and cultural traits. More often than not, these projects were conducted in a haphazard way, by engaging specifically with individual problems and local concerns, resulting in lack of inter-relatedness and coordination between different projects. This has resulted in negative effects on the projects’ final achievements in terms of accomplishing NMA’s community development goals. Although partnered with local governments, these projects did not always attune their individual programs to government’s expectations in order to achieve best results. To do so involves efficient communication with local officials, making them well aware that the projects’ funding is invested for knowledge empowerment and capacity building, not as complementary alternative money for trivial projects. At the same time, the local project leaders should have communicated more effectively with local officials for better cooperation and resources mobilization. In this regard, NMA projects have room for further improvement in terms of resource integration and networking between international and national potential partners. Due to insufficient investment on FAO staff capacity building, this has to some extent influenced the final achievement of the NMA projects. Although these projects are varied in content, they are consistent in presentation – almost all have been conducted as class room style induction – proven to be inefficient by villagers. According to on-site interviews, many villagers said that what they prefer is hands-on training experience that can be immediately applied rather than abstract and impractical training. At the same time, the capacity building and knowledge training conducted to date has failed to weave together the texture of endemic knowledge e.g. local linguistic and cultural specificities. Accordingly, this training has been construed by local villagers to be esoteric and farfetched. Due to many social problems stemming from international issues, these villages are affected by AIDS, drugs, environmental degradation and cross-border marriages. More projects should be designed to address these special situations, in order to provide this bio-diversified and ethnically unique area with a better eco-future. Longchuan’s context in the wider background of southwest China and volatile Southeast Asia impresses the consulting team with its cultural and environmental characteristics. This has led us to consider what the ideal way to accommodate the cultural specificity and ethnic characteristics of local people may be, in order to assist them in pursuing sustainable livelihoods within this cross-border, underdeveloped, culturally enriched and bio-diversified region. As a recommendation, more projects should be designed to assist inbound Burmese brides to merge more cohesively into local communities. They are in the extreme vulnerable group with the limited social capital, and are incapable to be involved in the community because of cross-cutting issues such as language, culture, economics, and so on. This also makes obstacles for their families’ livelihood promotion, and further impacts villagers’ ecological structure, power structure and knowledge structure. Through caring about and investing in such special groups, the rural conventional knowledge system can be recovered. The addition of IT resources with knowledge about local, typical ecological and cultural conditions can enable local agriculture to be diversified, as well as make more local forestry and forest land ecologically available. At the family level, it is recommended to facilitate farmers to realize the comprehensive management of community and house yard hygiene, mixing some settlement and energy programs, for example drying yards, biogas, concrete ground cohesive with pestilence prevention. Mechanisms should also be established for environment management regulations. Along with these processes, we recommend gradually establishing community organizations, and strengthening the local comprehensive mechanisms of community mobilization as well as coordination, as well as adding diversity and variegation of culture-ecology. Comments from the organisation, if any: