Module 12 - Brazil: Empowering Rural Communities for Poverty Reduction

Lessons Learned and Issues for Wider Applicability

This established program provides both broad lessons for rural development and specific lessons for project design and implementation:

• Decentralization of fiscal and investment decision making—from federal to state and local governments and to community organizations—ensures efficient program administration, cost-effective investments, and superior outcomes.
  
  
• Participatory, CDD mechanisms promote social capital formation by giving poor rural communities a unique set of experiences in collective action, priority-setting, decision making, physical and financial management, and subproject operation and maintenance, while delivering tangible benefits. Communities are empowered to voice their demands, improving local governance. Social capital is both a benefit in its own right and an element of success in community-driven poverty reduction.
  
  
• Technical assistance enhances the ability of community associations to identify, prepare, and implement subprojects, increasing their capacity to compete for project investment funds with other, similar communities. Locating and/or developing sources of technical assistance in rural areas requires continuous attention.
  
  
• Standardization of subproject documents, technical designs, and unit costs simplifies subproject preparation and appraisal, improves subproject quality, facilitates procurement, prevents overdesign, reduces costs, and promotes participation by poor communities.
  
  
• Poverty targeting should be simple, verifiable, and based on objective criteria that foster transparency, minimize political interference in project resource allocation, and ensure that resources reach the poorest. Aggregate experience shows that effective poverty targeting combines self-selection by beneficiary communities with formal, data-based definition among cohorts of poor rural communities, to target the project geographically and allocate project funds by poverty level, based on HDI and other comparable indices.
  
  
• Scaling up CDD’s impact on rural incomes through investments in productive activities/facilities is a challenge. Productive investments based on matching grants need rigorous selection, preparation, technical assistance, supervision, and linkage to a graduation strategy that normalizes their relationships with markets and inputs. They make sense if services cover a majority of community members, use is regulated by operational guidelines, operation and maintenance are assured through user fees, training and awareness-building are provided, technical assistance is built in and followed up, and impact criteria for HDI and environment are met.
  
  
• Greater impact on poverty reduction is possible through scaling up, using CDD mechanisms to improve the allocation and use of resources from other programs. Pilot experiences in Northeast Brazil integrated the execution of complementary state and federal programs (in agriculture, education, health, and environment) with the ongoing planning and investment activities of the project-created Municipal Councils, improving the execution of those programs by channeling them through the participatory Councils and leveraging additional resources for the projects’ targeted communities.