In August 2006, MCC and the Government of Ghana signed a five-year, $547 million compact to reduce poverty by raising farmers’ incomes through private sector-led agribusiness development and major public works projects in the capital of Accra. The compact consisted of a three-pronged series of investments in 30 districts across the country. The Agriculture Project was designed to enhance returns from staple food and horticulture crops produced by low-income smallholder farmers as well as to support the expansion of higher-value commercial agriculture through improved delivery of business and technical services. The Transportation Project was designed to reduce costs related to agricultural commerce at local and regional levels. And the Rural Development Project was designed to strengthen rural institutions providing complementary and supportive services for agricultural and agribusiness development.
This report provides a summary of the tangible outputs of the compact program, documentation of changes in compact activities and the reasons for them, the available information on progress against targets in the monitoring plan, and the status of independent evaluations undertaken. Given the delivery later in 2017 or in 2018 of some of the evaluations for compact activities, this report will be updated to include that information once the evaluations are final.
Under this compact, MCC and the Government of Ghana completed the construction of a major highway through the center of Accra, delivered commercial skills training to nearly 1,200 farmer based organizations and 67,000 farmers, irrigated more than 500 hectares, and built or rehabilitated 250 classroom blocks[[A school block is a group of three classrooms.]] in 204 communities. Approximately 98 percent of all compact funds were disbursed by compact closure in February 2012. In addition, all policy requirements related to reform of land administration and land management, national plant protection, and road maintenance expenditures were met on time.
Nonetheless, Ghana faced some difficulties in meeting the intended compact objectives. Because of the larger than average number of activities under each project, MCC’s 5-year time limit on disbursements, and MCC’s refusal to increase the total amount of the compact, significant changes and trade-offs in some of the project activities were unavoidable. These re-scopings and reallocations made for a stronger compact, but also made evaluating economic rates of return and performance measurements against original targets difficult. Recalculating estimated economic rates of return (ERRs) at the compact’s end date for instance, was not feasible for those projects where the original design assumption no longer applied after program changes were made.