The Comoros Social Fund's Project objective is to support demand driven initiatives developed by communities and in so doing create employment and improve access to basic services. The project became effective on August 5, 1998. Barely ten days later, the deteriorating country situation led to a suspension of disbursements. The Government basically disengaged from any development related activities and the constant reshuffling of Ministers in Comoros permitted very little dialogue on education, health or social protection issues. The project was designed to have Comorian rural communities as its key interlocutor. Communities in Comoros are strong, dynamic, and their cohesiveness results in a short and medium-term vision as to what type of development activities are priorities for their respective communities (school rehabilitation, water, feeder road rehabilitation, etc.) and a willingness to invest time and money (mainly from remittances from family members abroad) to achieve their development goals. The project was supervised in 3 phases: (i) suspension of disbursements (August 1998 March 2000)
(ii) project start-up after the suspension was lifted (March 200-March 2001)
and (iii) "normalization" (April 2001-present). A quality of supervision of risk projects was conducted by the Bank's Quality Assurance Group ( QAG ) in October 2001. The overall assessment was that this was an exemplary supervision effort, adapting to difficult and changing conditions.