Sustainability of rural development projects in ... - sahee foundation

Sustainability of rural development projects in Swaziland
sahee
3.5
3
2.5
2
Success
1.5
1
2.9
2.4
2.6
0.5
0
no assistance little assistance much assistance
External assistance for marketing
Figure 14
10. Improvement of the standard of living
Hypothesis: A project is successful if it results in a clear improvement of the standard of living
for each beneficiary.
The thinking behind this hypothesis is that group members are more inclined to work hard for
a project if this project results in obvious – financial – benefits for them. If a project brings
clear advantages, it is likely to be continued by its beneficiaries. Our field visits and
qualitative data showed that projects rarely lead to a “clear improvement in the standard of
living”. Members of projects don’t distinguish themselves with better clothing, bigger houses,
or the possession of more consumer goods compared to their neighbours. The study showed
that income generated by a project is mainly used for school fees, medical treatment, and to
satisfy demands from poor relatives, long before reinvestments can be made. Some projects
failed because members rather used their income for urgent household expenditures than
saving funds to buy inputs that are required to continue the project. On the other hand,
neighbours jealously watch over any increase of wealth through the benefits of a project.
Therefore, people try to hide benefits which they receive through a project.
To estimate the impact of project benefits, we have asked beneficiaries for their own rating.
Nearly two thirds of the respondents said that their standard of living remained similar in spite
of the project. For one third of the respondents, the project brought a moderate improvement
of the standard of living at the homestead level.
In figure 15, Kendall Rank Correlation 4 shows a high correlation between the improvement of
the standard of living ascribable to a project and project success, the p value being 0.02. In
other words: Projects that result in an improvement of the standard of living have a
significantly higher success rate.
4 We have used Kendall analysis here because there were only two categories, which cannot be
calculated with the Kruskal-Wallis test. In this analysis, two outliers are excluded. On page 28 we
present an overview of p values, using the Kruskal-Wallis for the whole sample. This results in a
higher p value.
24