High turnover of government project staff affects institutional memory and implies additional time and effort to introduce the project’s concepts to a new team to
ensure the government is involved and owns the project implementation.
Maintaining key specialists even after major institutional changes helps keep institutional memory within the executing agency and is important for successful project implementation. During project implementation, the government’s economic reform caused institutional changes in the road sector. Despite the change, key members of project management unit remained unchanged, which helped minimize delay.
Lack of continuity in the staff of key project agencies could lead to chronic implementation delays. Procurement of works and recruitment of consultants followed due process and were completed; albeit with delays. Although NHA has carried out procurement for multiple MDB-financed projects; a lack of continuity of key staff at its Procurement and Contract Administration posed challenges for each procurement and this project was no exception. Procurement consultant support is a regular feature provided by ADB.
Institutional continuity, through the retention of project staff throughout implementation, is crucial to project success. Most of the EA and IA staff were retained throughout the project implementation period. The resulting institutional continuity tremendously helped the successful completion of the project.
Program design and implementation in least developed (and fragile) countries need to take account of the limited administrative capacity of the government. While ADB designed a program which supported the government in undertaking reforms and sufficient consulting services resources to help bridge capacity gaps, the timeframe for the program was too ambitious and ADB did not provide adequate continuity in the staff providing project supervision. These deficiencies contributed to the underperformance in program outcomes.
Continuity of services of experienced project staff is essential. The project director and account officer positions at the project coordination office experienced high turnover, which affected overall performance, including of project financial management, as evidenced by the outstanding recurring audit issues and multiple delayed submissions.