for changes in the project implementation, and more likely reflects client/ government priorities (box 5.7). Findings from the survey corroborate the impression that client participation is central to IE use. According to the survey of evaluators, 58 percent of completed World Bank IEs that had client involvement in the design stage were also used to inform the design of follow-on or new projects, compared with 40 percent of
Box 5.7
Partnership with Project Teams and Clients: Vietnam and Central America
Vietnam Rural Energy Project The Vietnam Rural Energy Project aimed to expand rural access to electricity in Vietnam through grid extension. The desired outcomes were to improve welfare, enhance earning capacity, and help alleviate poverty. The IE found significant impacts on households’ income, expenditures, and educational outcomes. The impacts are higher during the first few years after a household receives electricity, and incremental benefits eventually level off after about nine years of electricity use. The IE was sent to the project team and country office but was never presented to the government. It was not available for the project ICR or decisions regarding the follow-on project. The Bank team found the language of the IE too technical to understand. As a result, the project team felt little ownership of the IE findings. The government was eager to partner with the World Bank in evaluating similar projects because it lacked the capacity to do so and the energy sector had not been widely evaluated. The government expected the evaluation to answer many questions that were important but beyond its scope. Because of a lack of partnership, no dissemination, and different expectations, the IE was not used by the government or project team. Central American Coffee Project The project partners in the Coffee Value Chain Project in Central America were interested in conducting a credible evaluation to assess the impacts of the project since its beginning. The project was a public-private partnership between IFC, the Nestlé Group, and ECOM. The objective of the project was to increase the income (shared value) of coffee farmers in the Central American and Southern Mexican region included in the ECOM-Nestlé Value Chain. It sought to do this by improving their social and environmental standards to gain premium prices, and by decreasing their operating costs and enhancing their productivity. IFC contracted IEs for two components of the project, productive investments and improving sustainable investments. The goal of the IEs was to assess the impacts of the project and to test certain design features. The key facilitating factor in these evaluations was client buy-in. Partners invested time in collecting the data and reviewing the final drafts and were interested in using the findings. Stakeholder interviews revealed that the reports need to be clear and more readable. In response to the stakeholders’ demands to understand IE findings better, the project team hired a consultant to prepare a summary note of these evaluations and triangulate findings with qualitative data. Sources: IEG country case studies.
Use and Influence of World Bank Group Impact Evaluations
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