At a Glance

Funder:

Millennium Challenge Corporation

Project Time Frame:

2010-2015

Moldova: Evaluating Agricultural and Irrigation Improvements

photo of rural area of Moldova The Millennium Challenge Corporation’s compact with the Republic of Moldova includes several initiatives designed to combat poverty and stimulate economic growth, especially in rural areas. The compact funds projects to rehabilitate irrigation infrastructure, transfer water management rights, promote high-value agriculture production and sales, and rehabilitate roads. Mathematica is designing and implementing rigorous impact evaluations for several compact activities. This rigorous impact assessment can give policymakers the objective tools they need to determine the programs’ effectiveness in stimulating high-value agriculture and reducing poverty in Moldova.

The evaluation will focus on three compact activities: the access to agricultural finance (AAF) activity, the irrigation sector reform activity and centralized irrigation systems rehabilitation activity (ISRA-CISRA), and the training subactivity of the Growing High-Value Agriculture Sales (GHS) or Agricultural Competitiveness and Enterprise Development (ACED) activity.

The AAF activity establishes a credit facility that will provide three to seven years of financing to farmers and rural entrepreneurs to support greater investment in the post-harvest supply chain. Recipients must use loans made through the program for post-harvest investments, such as building facilities for cold storage, sorting, and packaging; each loan financed by the AAF credit line must be between $50,000 and $600,000. Mathematica will evaluate a pilot of this credit facility. To evaluate the credit facility pilot, we plan to adopt a quasi-experimental design (such as a “fuzzy” regression discontinuity design or a matched comparison group design), which will measure impacts by comparing outcomes of AAF loan recipients with similar nonrecipients, including those who might have received loans from other sources.

ISRA-CISRA involves the rehabilitation of irrigation systems following the transfer of water management rights to water users’ associations. To evaluate ISRA-CISRA, we plan to use a matched comparison group design, measuring outcomes for farmers served by centralized irrigation systems selected for rehabilitation against farmers in similar systems not selected for rehabilitation.

The GHS or ACED activity is a multicomponent project designed to address the impediments to a competitive high-value agriculture sector in Moldova. The activity will include numerous subactivities, including a farmer training subactivity that focuses on particular value chains. Mathematica will evaluate the training subactivity in the context of the larger activity. For the GHS/ACED farmer training subactivity evaluation, we plan to measure program impacts as differences in outcomes between farmers who live near communities randomly selected to host trainings and farmers who live near communities randomly selected not to host trainings.