Gansu Featured Agriculture and Financial Services System Development Project

It is important for future projects to exhaust options to finance a certified institute to prepare IEEs. The project management office's initiative to use a project implementation consultant to prepare the IEEs for category B subprojects was a pragmatic solution to fulfill ESMS requirements and reduce the financial burden on subborrowers. Nonetheless, this approach may have contributed to the suboptimal quality of the IEEs and added to the consultant’s intended key roles, i.e., project oversight, training, monitoring, and reporting. Future financial intermediation loan projects should consider options to finance a certified institute to prepare the IEEs.