The Agriculture Sector Program (ASP), a sector approach to development, is a medium- to long-term national program specifically for agriculture. The formulation, scope, and sequencing of an ASP depends on the depth of the country’s private sector, the status of its policy framework, and its institutional capacity to plan and implement a development program. Donors support government priorities as contained in the program. This eliminates the fragmentation, duplication, and lack of country ownership common under the conventional project investment approach. Donor involvement should include technical assistance for capacity building (through training of preparation and management teams, workshops, and other activities), sector studies, and developing information and communication systems. In many countries, the effectiveness of donor assistance to agriculture has been less than satisfactory. An important reason is that when aid is delivered through a variety of projects, it results in a fragmented approach to agricultural development. Even if individual projects are well designed, the multiplicity of donors, objectives, management systems, and procedures make it difficult for sector managers to absorb and manage aid efficiently. Often donors have taken the lead in identifying, designing, and implementing projects. Although they do so with good intentions, this does little to help the country develop capacity or foster a sense of ownership of its development projects. Sectorwide Programs in Agriculture
Sectorwide programs in agriculture, as in other sectors, function as an umbrella to help ensure the coherence of donor-supported government activities. Sector program approaches support a single sector policy and expenditure program, under government leadership, adopting uniform procedures to disburse and account for all funds. A sector program is defined as one that covers all the activities in a given sector (often used to mean all the activities of a government ministry’s budgetary programs). A sectorwide program: (1) is sectorwide in scope or coverage; (2) is based on a coherent sector policy framework; (3) is prepared and managed by local stakeholders; (4) includes program participation by all major donors, thus avoiding duplication and conflict with other donor projects; (5) adopts, to the extent possible, the same arrangements for accounting, budgeting, procurement, and progress reporting, for all donors; and (6) is in line with the country’s institutional capacity. Benefits Evidence suggests that projects perform significantly worse in situations of macroeconomic instability. However, stand-alone projects are ill-equipped to initiate macroeconomic reform, and adjustment lending, although suited to addressing “stroke of the pen reforms” (such as export tariff elimination), is not very successful in dealing with complex issues requiring longer gestation periods (for example, privatization of parastatals). ASP combines reforms in key sectoral policies, expenditure patterns, and institutions with financing for a sectoral expenditure program with a longer-term horizon.   
|
RSS