Thursday 2 July 2009

Using retrospective analysis to estimate the poverty alleviation impacts of change

I just re-read an interesting report from Sahal Darghouth and others of the World Bank about the poverty alleviation impacts of its agricultural water projects. Although it focuses strongly on blue agricultural water projects, the report makes an interesting observation – probably true of all similar projects – that ‘despite the likely poverty reduction impact….there was rarely a sense of agricultural water projects as part of a coherent poverty reduction strategy ’ (my italics).

A cause, the reports states, is the lack of clarity about agricultural water’s role in poverty reduction. The report proceeds to call for better analysis to understand the more complex (distributional) effects that can arise as water distribution and productivity changes.

My question is this: Are we making the opposite mistake? In addition to understanding the water-related causes of poverty, should we also be thinking about methods to predict the effects of ‘improvements’ (whatever we mean by this) in water distribution and productivity?

I do not want to distract teams from the excellent work they are doing of analyzing water-related poverty in basins. But I am wondering how to make the forward link with, for example, analysis that shows the impact of changes in water productivity. Who has ideas on a conceptual model for this?

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