Greater attention should be paid to the strategic results framework during project design:

It is hard to understand how the project’s SRF was approved. Log frames or SRFs are many and varied and invariably there are different opinions and often heated discussion on what constitutes an outcome, an objective, an indicator and a target. However, in this instance the SRF had structural weaknesses (e.g. output indicators) as well as the inappropriate choice and / or phrasing and the number of indicators, baselines and targets. This raises important questions about who in the process of project cycle management has control over the SRF. As the principle monitoring and evaluation tool for a GEF project it is surprising how little attention is paid to the SRF during the design. In the event, the decision by the project to continue with the SRF was a correct one, in the opinion of the TE. To have tried to revise the SRF into anything more useful would have required significant changes to it and caused long delays. Therefore, all parties were correct to keep working with the SRF despite its shortcomings, but this was not without risk had something gone wrong.

Attention should be paid to assessing risks in the project design:

There were a number of un-assessed risks not mentioned in the Project Document risk assessment. The most important were related to the NEEAP and the National Drought Action Plan. It was already clear at the time of design that the NEEAP would expire and the NDAP was expected to be produced in time for the project’s start up. This is not to say that the project did not respond correctly when these risks materialised. In fact, the project responded very thoughtfully and effectively making hard decisions and taking effective and adaptive action to address them.