This report looks at two finished public works programmes in Ethiopia and Kenya to assess the impacts of these projects on people’s long-term livelihoods and resilience.

Billions of dollars are spent on public works programmes (PWPs). Wage transfers to poor or food insecure people typically form around half the budget. The additional costs of supervision and construction materials are justified by the benefits that the works are expected to create.

Yet those benefits, the impacts of these assets on people’s livelihoods are never studied, meaning that lessons are not being learned about how, when — or whether — to use public work programmes.

Using mixed methods in two case studies (in Ethiopia, public works for soil and water conservation on hillsides in North Wollo; in Kenya, works for earth dams for water access in Moyale County), we set out to test whether it was possible to assess the impacts on the livelihoods and resilience of local people of assets that had been created by public work programmes three to five years earlier. Having identified little impact, we asked what caused the weak performance of said PWP assets.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute