World Bank Irrigation Technical Assistance Contract in Albania – ME&A

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World Bank Irrigation Technical Assistance Contract in Albania

Project Snapshot

CLIENT: World Bank

COUNTRY: Albania

PRACTICE AREA: Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning; Water and Natural Resource Management

SUBCONTRACTORS: IDRA Research & Consulting and DeveloperSix

TIME PERIOD: 2019-2020

Local ingenuity plus international donor aid has worked well in the Balkans

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Overview

ME&A is providing technical assistance to improve irrigation performance, monitoring, and evaluation at the municipal level in Albania. Agriculture is a very important sector of Albania’s economy providing employment for about 40 percent of the population. Reliable irrigation and drainage infrastructure is critical for increasing Albania’s agricultural yields and exports while safeguarding against severe weather risks and climate change effect

Activities

ME&A’s technical assistance will enable the Government of Albania to increase the effectiveness of municipal Irrigation and Drainage Units (IDUs), which it recently established to manage irrigation networks and irrigation dams within municipality boundaries. ME&A’s technical assistance will focus on four municipalities with Albania’s largest irrigation areas—Divjaka, Lushnje, Roskovec, and Konispol—and include local farmers as well as IDU personnel.

A key part of the contract is creating an Irrigation and Drainage Management Information System (IDMIS) integrating operation and maintenance of irrigation systems with monitoring and evaluation and programmatic support within a modern, uniform, and centralized management information system including geographic information systems (GIS). The IDMIS will enable municipal IDUs to:

Collect, process, and visualize data on monitoring and evaluation framework indicators to assess progress achieved
Make better decisions using GIS and contextual tools for mapping
Access online tools for planning, documentation, complaint handling, etc.

The IDMIS will also, in the future, become an important tool for the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development to identify, assess, and prioritize support programs and monitor progress against service delivery targets.