Anseba Local Development Project aims to reduce poverty in Anseba Region as a basis for sustained self- development. ALDP seeks to reduce poverty in Anseba by providing basic social and economic infrastructure, improving the natural resource base of local communities, and enhancing local human capital endowments (such as increased awareness of health risks like HIV/AIDS). In addition, ALDP directly addresses the wider institutional issues (planning, finance and implementation arrangements) linked to the continued delivery of pro-poor public infrastructure and services by local government in Anseba.

The immediate objective of the project is to ensure that local government in Anseba Region delivers public infrastructure and services based on responsive, transparent and pro-poor planning procedures. This implies that pro-poor infrastructure and services will be delivered in Anseba and that the planning system which ensures this is institutionalised and thus taken on as the officially endorsed way of doing so. The project, then, has both a pro-poor planning focus as well as an explicit policy impact. ALDP will finally deliver the following four outputs:

• A participatory and transparent planning system will be established that ensures the identification and design of locally prioritised pro-poor projects;
• Access to and management of financial resources for funding development plans by local government units in Anseba will be improved. This will be achieved by undertaking four types of activity;
• Regional and local capacity to deliver, operate and maintain projects efficiently will be strengthened;
• The Anseba planning process, styles of programming and project design, and policy issues arising from this experience will inform national policy.

• Poverty in Eritrea has many dimensions: inadequate social and economic infrastructure, chronic and widespread food insecurity. Poverty has been deepened as a result of a three- year border conflict with Ethiopia. Within Eritrea, Zoba Anseba (although relatively unaffected by the recent conflict) is one of the most drought prone regions and thus faces recurrent food security crises. ALDP, by making funds available for infrastructure and other investments through a pro-poor and participatory planning process, will contribute to improving food security and reducing poverty in Zoba Anseba. ALDP will promote pro-poor and food security oriented planning through its prioritisation procedures and the fiscal incentives it offers to local government for addressing such issues.
• Within the overall policy context in Ethiopia, ALDP – by working to strengthen local government capacities in Anseba and by aiming to pilot innovative and participatory ways of planning and implementing local development – is contributing towards helping Government of the State of Eritrea drive forward its agenda on decentralisation and local governance.

• The primary responsibility for implementation of ALDP lies with the Regional Government of Anseba, assisted by the Project Support Team (PST), which will is based in the offices of the Regional administration in Keren.

• Population in 10 Sub-Zoba, Anseba Region
• 400,000 persons

• 2005 Mid Term Evaluation

• Piloting a bottom-up participatory development planning process involving stakeholders at the kebabi (collection of villages), sub-zoba (sub-regional level), and Zoba (regional) levels. The Ministry of National Development (MND) has participated, and expressed keen interest in learning from the process for policy impact;
• The ALDP has provided a discretionary Local Development Fund (LDF) to Zoba Anseba for three years, an initiative that is novel to Eritrea;
• Using the LDF, the project has approved the implementation of 31 community projects in the water, education, roads and health sectors;
• The project is using institutional arrangements housed within the national systems. At the national level, there is the National Steering Committee (NSC) and MND as the executing agency. In addition, the local government structures in Zoba Anseba are active partners in the implementation and management of the programme, which may contribute to the sustainability of both the process and outputs;
• The community members are active participants in project planning, implementation, monitoring and management (including operation and maintenance of investments);
• The programme has commissioned studies to establish the situation and recommend strategies for addressing food insecurity and enhancing local revenue mobilisation; and
• ALDP has provided the opportunity for a wide range of capacity building activities including delivery of training (and development of training materials), providing equipment, and supporting study tours to Uganda and Tanzania.

• The participatory planning process at the kebabi level is not deepened because the Kebabi level is limited to ‘raw project ideas identification’. Though it is the project’s intention, the linkages between the bottom-up and regional development planning processes are not explicit;
• The allocation of LDF across sub-zobas is based on population and poverty, but the project lacks concrete and reliable data on poverty, which makes the horizontal allocation formula prone to subjectivity;
• There is gross under spending of LDF (at approximately 38% of the budgeted expenditure) because of the suspension of project activities in 2004, and delays in implementation due to difficulties in attracting contractors, as well as contractors hiking fees, and the unavailability of construction materials;
• The LDF is not transferred to and managed by sub-zobas as intended, and the incentive-based allocation system is not operational (for example, the minimum conditions are not formally assessed, and rewards and sanctions not applied);
• The project has not been able to implement priorities and investments directly in the productive sector, despite the food insecurity in the region2; and
• Some stakeholders are not always aware of the ALDP as a UNCDF ‘policy experiment’.

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