Counterparts from the Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP) Bicol, CALABARZON and MIMAROPA offices participated in the Cluster-wide Training and Workshop on the revised framework of the Rapid Appraisal of Emerging Benefits (RAEB) in Oriental Mindoro.

RAEB is an evaluation tool designed to identify if the Project’s interventions are contributing to the achievement of its overall development objectives.

Spearheaded by the National Project Coordination Office (NPCO), the training focused on systematizing among regions the way of gathering data from farmers and trader beneficiaries, project affected persons, Indigenous Peoples, and local government officials through household surveys, focus group discussions, and key informant interviews.

The environmental impact of subprojects was also given importance, which the revised framework highlighted.

After the discussions, participants interviewed different groups of beneficiaries from the Rehabilitation/Upgrading Dulangan I–Dulangan II Farm-to-Market Road, one of the pilot infrastructures of PRDP in the MIMAROPA Region.

This enabled them to experience gathering data on travel time, hauling cost, traffic count, and transport loss to determine the new road’s effect on the beneficiaries’ volume and value of agricultural production.

Data on other effects such as expanded marketing practices and new employment opportunities that create additional livelihood to beneficiaries were also gathered.

Furthermore, the PRDP – Monitoring and Evaluation Unit explained that RAEB is a crucial activity in the middle and end points of the Project’s implementation as its results can determine more appropriate and sustainable measures in the operation of current and future supports.

Throughout its six-year span, PRDP targets to increase the annual real farm incomes of its beneficiaries, increase the value of annual marketed output, and increase the access of farmers and fisherfolk by providing key facilities, infrastructure, technology and information to rural stakeholders to improve services on agriculture.

It is important, therefore, to determine if these stream of investments are turning into the planned outcomes as projected in each subproject’s feasibility study. ### (Leira Vic Colongon, DA-PRDP MIMAROPA RPCO InfoACE Unit)

PRDP Monitoring and Evaluation Unit Head Jourvin Barrera discusses the revised Rapid Appraisal of Emerging Benefits framework to participants from the Bicol, CALABARZON and MIMAROPA Region. (Photo by Ana Francesca Chavez)

PRDP technical personnel from the Monitoring and Evaluation Unit and Economics Unit interviews a farmer-beneficiary of the Dulangan I – Dulangan II Farm-to-Market Road as part of the cluster-wide training. (Photo by Ana Francesca Chavez)