Mid-term Evaluation Report on the Liangshan Development Project

Background:
Liangshan Development Project is a holistic community development project initiated with a health and development project for leprosy patients and families in 2001. During the first period of the project (2001-2006), the project has gained knowledge and experiences in a broad field including health, education, infrastructure construction, and agriculture. The project was highly appreciated by the evaluation group in 2006 and as a result, a new five year project (2007-2011) was confirmed to be carried out with more focus on capacity building of local people.

Purpose/objective:
The evaluation is a mid-term evaluation in order to review the project so far and give recommendations for the last project period.

Methodology:
In the five-day on-site evaluation, the evaluation team has conducted interviews with Shincon Kunming Office staffs, Yanyuan Project Office staffs, visiting the project villages, holding meeting with beneficiary villagers and their families and meeting with county project leading group, and got a holistic impression of the project.

Key findings:
1. The main achievements have been made by the project
 The project design is properly meeting the problems of the poverty areas of Liangshan. In cooperation with local government, the project had constructed new schools and drinking water infrastructures, introduced bio-gas units. These project activities have greatly accelerated the development of poor villages.
 The project implementation properly followed the project proposal with high participation of all stakeholders. The outputs include: Paoma Village School and 13 bio-gas units of Paoma village; drinking water system of Beishan village (63 households have pipe water in their houses) and 16 bio-gas units; 125 bio-gas units in Er Dao Gou village and a newly expanded village school. In addition to these, the project has created a village level project leading group in Er Dao Gou village.
 The county project office has a good project management system that includes: need assessment and analysis of project villages; strict monitory to project implementation; complete project documentation management; proper financial management regulations and close communication and connection with beneficiaries.
 The beneficiaries commonly agree that the project had settled the urgent difficulties that the villages are facing in the development to carry out direct activities on education, water and energy.
 The Yanyuan county government has given high attention to the cooperation with Shincon and NMA. It has established a project Steering Committee with the leaders of relevant departments as the member. With the efforts of local government, the Er Dao Gou village becomes the model village for resettlement.

Recommendations:
2. Recommendations made by the evaluation team
Concluded from the evaluation, recommendations are suggested by the evaluation team:
 To develop a holistic village development project that is based on the villagers. The project should take the capacity building as the core and the bio-gas development as the set point to realize an involvement of multiple departments and resources.
 To design an integrative capacity building action plan for villagers including project management, implementation, and varies applicable technologies.
 To improve the capacity of project management staffs in county level through diversified ways including training, studying tour and communication etc.
 To design a comprehensive project based on bio-gas but connected with grain production, animal husbandry, sanitary improvement and environmental protection.

3. Lessons learned from the project
Some lessons learned from the project implementation for further improvement are:
 The wide spread of project villages have increased the cost of project. It is suggested to concentrate the project activities in 2 or 3 villages in the next period of the project.
 The large scale of bio-gas construction is more efficient and has higher effectiveness. It will be easier for post-construction management and maintenance.

Comments from the organisation, if any:
We have taken the recommendations into account. Some of them we agree with and they have provided good guidance for last couple of years in the project, however, we do not agree with all of the findings and recommendations.