Regular monitoring and early course correction are required to mitigate poor project readiness and weak baselines. The project suffered from project readiness issues that resulted in significant cost overruns and delays. While ideally these would be captured before project approval, if they are not, it is imperative that identified flaws are acted on as soon as possible during implementation to allow for course correction. In particular, the reluctance of farmers to repay investment costs provided from ADB financing should have been identified much sooner than 4 years into implementation by conducting willingness-to-pay surveys or through similar means. Similarly, the uncertainty over crop yield baselines and the causal link between the project activities and crop yields (as opposed to between the activities and the increase in the crop area) could have been captured earlier and reflected in the midterm review.
Land Improvement Project