Several years after the tsunami it was a pleasure to return to Sri Lanka to evaluate the work of another part of the Red Cross Movement on the other side of the island.
The evaluation covered four projects in three areas, and included agricultural projects (including the restoration of cinnamon plantations), and other forms of livelihoods such as food processing and trading, as well as discussing the linkages between providing permanent housing and livelihoods.
The evaluation report can be found on the CaLP website here:
Innovation: The evaluation team visited a good number of resettlement and livelihoods projects and heard from beneficiaries associated with many more. Some had been more successful and some less. In a few cases the reasons for this were pretty clear – beneficiaries had been poorly (or very well) selected, appropriate levels of inputs and training were provided. But in many cases things were much less clear cut.
This evaluation report proposes (in an annex, pages 41 to 43) a simple analytical framework which seeks to identify many of the factors that contribute to the success of failure of a livelihoods recovery project. It considers a range of 21 ‘common sense’ factors listed in three classes: household factors, location factors, and institutional or systemic factors, with examples that relate directly to the projects observed.
Practically, the report also applies the framework to the livelihood projects observed, in the second half of the findings (pages 29 to 37) to provide examples of how it might be applied.
The framework alone won’t tell you whether a specific livelihoods project will succeed of fail, and the examples don’t have weightings associated with them – although these could perhaps be added. But it does provide a fairly comprehensive structure within which to consider a project, thereby increasing its chance of success.