Département de Socio-économie Rurale et de Vulgarisation agricole, Faculté d’Agronomie et des Sciences Agricoles, Université de Dschang, BP 96, Dschang, Cameroon
This study on the evaluation of the performance of the portfolios of technical and financial partners of rural development projects and programmes in Cameroon, was carried out between July 2018 and November 2019. Its overall objective was to contribute to the assessment of the performance of projects and programmes in order to propose areas for improvement with a view to their overall success. Specifically, it was a question of assessing the technical and financial performance of rural development projects and programmes in Cameroon. The data were collected during individual and group interviews with the various stakeholders of development projects and programmes in Cameroon. Three hundred and sixty-nine (369) people, including representatives of technical and financial support agencies, project and programme staff, strategic and operational partners, beneficiaries and residents were surveyed with a participation rate of 91.86%. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis with SPSS version 26 and Excel. For other types of data, we verified their consistency against existing literature. The analysis of the data shows that seventeen (17) main technical and financial support agencies have been involved in the rural sector over the past two decades through fifty-six (56) rural development projects and programmes. The number of projects and programmes by portfolio of technical and financial support agencies varies from 2% for the smallest portfolio to 14% for the largest portfolio. The best performing technical and financial support agencies have a portfolio performance of 82% compared to 6% for the least performing. The portfolios of technical and financial partners, whose performance is very satisfactory, are those who have projects and programmes for setting up infrastructure such as the construction of slaughterhouses, rural electrification or the construction of factories etc. Moreover, it appears from our analysis that 53% of the financial resources granted by the technical and financial support agencies are not disbursed, which gives an average overall financial performance of 47%.