1.1 Background to the report

For Oxfam as a development organisation it becomes more and more important that country programmes and operational projects are well-designed and set themselves achievable objectives. Planning within the parameters of the office, project, and country is the key factor for developing a strong country programme.

Through specific reports on interesting Oxfam projects, Oxfam tries to arrive at a collection of practical experiences which can assist country offices to think about similar programmes which they want to start or which they have started already.

Oxfam's Ishtirak project in Chad, which is working with agro-pastoralists, is a project which is very suitable for such a purpose, not only because of the experience gained of an operational project but also because the project was designed in order to test a specific approach, of organising agropastoralists in pastoral associations (PAs), which is a very topical subject at the moment.

The aim of this report is to describe the developments during the first few years of the project's existence. It is an effort to analyse the factors that determined the development of the actual concept and the differences from the original concept. These processes are not unique for the Ishtirak project but occur in most development projects; however, in most cases these processes are not recorded or monitored and the experiences are sadly lost, for the project itself and for other interested parties.

For a full appreciation of the Ishtirak project, its limitations and achievements, this report tries to consider the project in the light of recent discussions on pastoral development and pastoral organisations.

The author of the report was the co-ordinator of the project from September 1988 to December 1990, after the project had been operational for one year (since June 1987).