Impacts of Small Water and Sediment Retention Structures Built by the Natural Disaster Mitigation Programme
- Measures what the retention structures built between 2017 and 2021 actually retain, and finds that in the Boucle Centre-Artibonite and the North most retain nothing: the average sediment volume deposited is nil for close to 57 percent of structures, and more than 83 percent of the basins had never held water three years after construction.
- Finds the agricultural benefit largely absent in those two regions, with useful agricultural area created nil for about 81 percent of the structures evaluated and only about 11 percent generating more than 100 square meters.
- Reports that residents make almost no use of the little water held in the energy dissipation basins, so even where water is present the intended benefit does not follow.
- Finds the South performing better on both counts: sediment deposited is nil for about 49 percent of structures and useful agricultural area is nil for about 57 percent, with some 42 percent generating more than 100 square meters.
- Notes that in the South no water retention structures were built upstream or downstream of the works, which bounds what the structures there can do.
- Is a rare instance of a program evaluating the physical performance of its own completed works rather than counting them, which is what makes the negative result usable.
Carried out under IDB grant 3622/GR-HA and Climate Investment Funds financing GRT/SX-15417, this evaluation assesses the socio-economic and hydraulic impacts of the small water and sediment retention structures built by the Natural Disaster Mitigation Programme in the Nord, the Nord-Est, the Boucle Centre-Artibonite and the Sud. Its participant list names the monitoring and evaluation staff by region, including Karl Geessy Emilien for the BCA and the Nord. Small check structures are the most common soil-conservation investment in Haiti and among the least systematically evaluated, so a four-region impact assessment is unusual. It reads alongside the gabion structure inventory for Camp-Perrin in this batch, which supplies the physical measurements for one of those regions.
How to cite
Government of Haiti; Ministry of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Rural Development (MARNDR); Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); Climate Investment Funds (CIF), 2022, Impacts of Small Water and Sediment Retention Structures Built by the Natural Disaster Mitigation Programme, https://agripubhaiti.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Evaluation-Rapport_dEvaluation-2022.doc