Abstract

As part of its greater portfolio in Northeast Brazil, IFAD supported the Brazilian government and State of Bahia to implement the Rural Communities Development Project in the Poorest Areas of the State of Bahia (PRODECAR), popularly referred to as Gente de Valor (GDV), between 2007 and 2013 .The purpose of GDV was to address the multitude of basic service gaps, empowerment deficit, and productive capacity needs experienced by residents of Brazil's Northeast region. Beneficiaries were drawn from the local population of sertanejos; a regional population named in reference to the dryland, sertão agro-climatic zone and among the poorest people in Brazil. As a CDD-style project, GDV's objective was to address their needs through a participatory process that would provide access to water-harvesting cisterns (primarily for household consumption), training on ecologically appropriate agricultural practices, technical assistance and technical inputs, as well as community capacitation to identify and address future development needs.

GDV was selected to be part of the IFAD10 Impact Assessment Agenda that consists of a broader set of impact assessments across the world. The aim is to generate evidence and provide lessons for better rural poverty reduction programs and to measure the impact of IFAD-supported programmes on enhancing rural people's economic mobility, increased agricultural productive capacity, improved market participation and increased resilience.

As almost six years having passed since the project closed, the analysis evaluates the sustainable impacts of GDV under the realm of access to infrastructure, agricultural productivity, poverty impacts, and empowerment of both women, youth and the community at large. Given the role that drought plays in affecting the economic opportunities of sertanejos, it is also relevant that this project evaluates outcomes following the recent multi-year drought. From the years 2010 to 2016, Bahia experienced a drought characterized as one of the worst of the century; affecting 33.4 million people and resulting in an estimated damage of approximately 30 billion USD (Marengo et al., 2017).

For more information, please, click on the following link https://www.ifad.org/en/web/knowledge/-/publication/impact-assessment-gente-de-valor-rural-communities-development-project-in-the-poorest-areas-of-the-state-of-bahia.

Geographic coverage

Regional coverage.

Analysis unit

Households

Kind of data

Sample survey data [ssd]

Sampling procedure

The qualitative portion of the evaluation was conducted prior to the quantitative survey in order to collect information on project targeting and implementation in the targeted areas. Two primary methodologies were employed: Focus Group Discussions (FGD) and Key Informant Interviews (KII). Qualitative interviews took place across seven sub-territories and 17 communities. Communities chosen for the qualitative survey were identified based on the following economic activities: cassava, goats, and backyard gardens in combination with high intensity of water-based activities.

The quantitative data collection covered 2,019 households, and 3,615 individuals (counting 1,615 partners interviewed for the WEAI), in 228 communities. Given that the nature of the intervention expected both household and community impacts, the construction of a counterfactual was a multi-stage process stratified at the community, and then household level.

More details on the sampling procedure can be found in the IA plan and reports, attached in the documentations tab.

Mode of data collection

Computer Assisted Personal Interview [capi]

Research instrument

The data were collected using a mixed-method approach in order to capture both expected and unexpected impacts of GDV. The data collection took place six years after the closing of GDV, offering time to identify longer-term outcomes that can lead to more realistic interpretations of impact rather than if the project had been assessed immediately after closure. The event of the multi-year drought, in tandem with continuing erratic rainfall and the loss of support from farmer-oriented public programs, further allows for assessment of the ability of the project to make beneficiaries resilient to drought and economic shocks.

The quantitative portion of the evaluation was primarily used for measurement of impact and consisted of two main instruments: a household-level questionnaire and a community-level questionnaire. These instruments covered a range of modules in order to estimate the multi-faceted aspects of welfare. In particular, the household questionnaire focused on agricultural production, agricultural sales, other income sources such as employment or government assistance, and consumption. Additionally, it included modules on assets, shocks, and migration in order to assess any wealth accumulation, exposure to shocks, and coping strategies. Given that the project placed emphasis on increasing women's leadership and decision-making, an abridged version of the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI), known as the Project WEAI (Pro-WEAI) was fielded to collect data on indicators that comparatively assess agency and empowerment of male and female decision-makers in a household.

The community questionnaire focused on services that are available to the community and relevant institutions such local infrastructure, economic activities, and access to services. The community questionnaire identified levels of community agency and resilience by asking about recent shocks, coping strategies, and collective action to promote local development. Because the project baseline was incomplete, project baseline data was not used, and respondents were asked to recall levels of assets owned at a reference period pre-GDV in both the community and household questionnaires.

Note: some variables have missing labels. Please, refer to the questionnaire for more details.

This dataset comprises interviews conducted between 2016 and 2018 with health service users, health professionals and health system managers in the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. The interviews focused in particular on the primary health care services covering two of the poorest sub-municipal districts, Cidade Tiradentes and Sapopemba. The Unequal Voices project – Vozes Desiguais in Portuguese – aimed to strengthen the evidence base on the politics of accountability for health equity via multi-level case studies of health systems in Brazil and Mozambique. The project examined the trajectories of change in the political context and in patterns of health inequalities in Brazil and Mozambique, and carried out four case studies to compare the operation of different accountability regimes across the two countries and between different areas within each country. The case studies tracked shifts in accountability relationships among managers, providers and citizens and changes in health system performance, in order to arrive at a better understanding of what works for different poor and marginalised groups in different contexts. In each country the research team studied one urban location with competitive politics and a high level of economic inequality and one rural location where the population as a whole has been politically marginalised and under-provided with services. Health inequities - that is, inequalities in health which result from social, economic or political factors and unfairly disadvantage the poor and marginalised - are trapping millions of people in poverty. Unless they are tackled, the effort to fulfill the promise of universal health coverage as part of the fairer world envisaged in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals may lead to more waste and unfairness, because new health services and resources will fail to reach the people who need them most. In Mozambique, for example, the gap in infant mortality between the best-performing and worst-performing areas actually increased between 1997 and 2008, despite improvements in health indicators for the country as a whole. However, while many low- and middle-income countries are failing to translate economic growth into better health services for the poorest, some - including Brazil - stand out as having taken determined and effective action. One key factor that differentiates a strong performer like Brazil from a relatively weak performer like Mozambique is accountability politics: the formal and informal relationships of oversight and control that ensure that health system managers and service providers deliver for the poorest rather than excluding them. Since the mid-1990s, Brazil has transformed health policy to try to ensure that the poorest people and places are covered by basic services. This shift was driven by many factors: by a strong social movement calling for the right to health; by political competition as politicians realised that improving health care for the poor won them votes; by changes to health service contracting that changed the incentives for local governments and other providers to ensure that services reached the poor; and by mass participation that ensured citizen voice in decisions on health priority-setting and citizen oversight of services. However, these factors did not work equally well for all groups of citizens, and some - notably the country's indigenous peoples - continue to lag behind the population as a whole in terms of improved health outcomes. This project is designed to address the ESRC-DFID call's key cross-cutting issue of structural inequalities, and its core research question "what political and institutional conditions are associated with effective poverty reduction and development, and what can domestic and external actors do to promote these conditions?", by comparing the dimensions of accountability politics across Brazil and Mozambique and between different areas within each country. As Mozambique and Brazil seek to implement similar policies to improve service delivery, in each country the research team will examine one urban location with competitive politics and a high level of economic inequality and one rural location where the population as a whole has been politically marginalised and under-provided with services, looking at changes in power relationships among managers, providers and citizens and at changes in health system performance, in order to arrive at a better understanding of what works for different poor and marginalised groups in different contexts. As two Portuguese-speaking countries that have increasingly close economic, political and policy links, Brazil and Mozambique are also well-placed to benefit from exchanges of experience and mutual learning of the kind that Brazil is seeking to promote through its South-South Cooperation programmes. The project will support this mutual learning process by working closely with Brazilian and Mozambican organisations that are engaged in efforts to promote social accountability through the use of community scorecards and through strengthening health oversight committees, and link these efforts with wider networks working on participation and health equity across Southern Africa and beyond. This dataset comprises interviews conducted between 2016 and 2018 with health service users, health professionals and health system managers in the Municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Interviewee sampling was purposive and made use of snowballing. The interviews focused in particular on the primary health care services covering two of the poorest suprefeituras (sub-municipal districts), Cidade Tiradentes and Sapopemba. The dataset includes a mix of transcripts and summary notes from individual and group interviews. All material is in Portuguese.

The aim of the Human Development Report is to stimulate global, regional and national policy-relevant discussions on issues pertinent to human development. Accordingly, the data in the Report require the highest standards of data quality, consistency, international comparability and transparency. The Human Development Report Office (HDRO) fully subscribes to the Principles governing international statistical activities.

The HDI was created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone. The HDI can also be used to question national policy choices, asking how two countries with the same level of GNI per capita can end up with different human development outcomes. These contrasts can stimulate debate about government policy priorities. The Human Development Index (HDI) is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.

The 2019 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) data shed light on the number of people experiencing poverty at regional, national and subnational levels, and reveal inequalities across countries and among the poor themselves.Jointly developed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford, the 2019 global MPI offers data for 101 countries, covering 76 percent of the global population. The MPI provides a comprehensive and in-depth picture of global poverty – in all its dimensions – and monitors progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 – to end poverty in all its forms. It also provides policymakers with the data to respond to the call of Target 1.2, which is to ‘reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definition'.

ABSTRACT There is a space in the state of Bahia - Brazil, which has been historically differentiated due to the predominance of the productive process of sisal. The use of agave sisalana was able to establish a productive chain for export, which had sufficient impact to spatially differentiate a large portion of the semiarid in Bahia, known as the Sisaleira Region. Our investigation identifies the origin of this process and proposes its analysis from the definition of periods that allow the temporal situation of the expansion and reduction of the planted area of sisal in order to identify the influence of this process on the economy and the politics of the municipalities involved. We present a characterization of the productive process of sisal and attempt to understand the formation of the Sisaleira Region from the following periods: the beginnings of the sisaleira crop; the creation of the productive system of sisal; the apogee of the green gold of the sertão; the lost decade of sisal; and the current period of restructuring. Our analysis seeks to understand how economics and politics are articulated in the process of differentiation that resulted in the formation of the Sisaleira Region.