This document describes an evidence-based evaluation of the immediate and long-term impact of LEVE/USAID grants to the fishfarming entities Caribbean Harvest Foundation and Caribbean Harvest Social Enterprise, both hereon referred to jointly as CH. Specifically, the study was interested in evaluating the impact on the resiliency of participating households.
After two months of intensive review of all the available literature, internet searches, hundreds of interviews, 10 focus groups, censuses of five villages, a nutritional survey of children, and in- depth follow-up surveys, our conclusion is that CH and its partners have had little to no impact on the resiliency of any more than a few beneficiaries. Specifically, there are only four impoverished lakeside fisherfolk who are currently project participants. Indeed, the CH activities are so insignificant that the Socio-Dig team could not identify a sample large enough to evaluate impact on beneficiary resiliency. Thus, most of the efforts of the research were focused on documenting and explaining the radical disjunction between CH and partners claims to have, for example, increased income levels by 1,000 percent for hundreds (if not thousands) of beneficiaries, and the reality of the program.
In 2014, LEVE gave a $250,000 grant to the CH project to increase its Croix-des-Bouquets hatchery solar energy capacity from 70 kw to 133 kw and to finance the construction of 257 cages for fishfarmers. In 2017 LEVE gave another $50,000 to CH to underwrite the establishment of a network of fish sales points. The Socio-Dig research team was tasked with evaluating the impact of these investments, specifically with respect to impact on the resiliency (capacity to resist shocks) of CH fishfarming beneficiaries in comparison to non-fishfarming families. While the study did find significantly better nutritional status among children in the community where CH currently shares cages with fishfarmers and supports social programs, there is little to no evidence that this has anything to do with CH activities.
