THE MECHANICS OF QUESTIONS AND COMPUTATIONS
Through FAO and World Bank funding, the authors have developed a set of EXCEL spreadsheets with two
characteristics:
1. Several hundred questions are provided that evaluators must answer in a standardized format. Questions cover
topics such as water supply, personnel management, canal structures, level of water delivery service throughout
the project, and numerous related topics.
2. The values of a large set of external and internal indicators are automatically computed. The automatic
computations provide rapid results and also eliminate computation errors.
RAP will be unsuccessful if the EXCEL files are merely mailed to local irrigation projects to be filled out.
Evaluators must understand the logic behind all the questions, and must learn how to go beyond the obvious when
obtaining data. Ideally, if two qualified persons complete a RAP on a single irrigation project, the indicators that
are computed by both persons will be very similar.
The framework for the EXCEL spreadsheets is given in Table I.
EXTERNAL