Indicators

Insufficient up-to-date macroeconomic data on government websites, which could hinder timely and effective planning especially during crisis periods, needs to be rectified. The State Statistical Committee (SSC) has numerous macroeconomic indicators on its website. However, in most cases, very recent data are missing. International organizations such as ADB, the IMF and the World Bank release forecasts of macroeconomic indicators for upcoming years, and SSC should consider following the same approach.

Accessibility of healthcare data in Azerbaijan needs to be improved. Reports from the Ministry of Health Care are not publicly available on its website. In addition, the State Agency for Mandatory Health Insurance considers healthcare information to be highly sensitive. Accordingly, this information is not contained on its website. Information related to daily coronavirus infections and vaccinations was released publicly. It would be useful for the agency to disseminate gender, age, and region-disaggregated information to the public.

Understanding the Private Sector Small Medium Enterprises (PSME) context is essential both at the design stage and during implementation. A detailed assessment of SME policy and institutional, political, and social context is required, with ADB engagement as part of a coordinated program of support by development partners for SME reform. As achieved under the PSME2, it is important that the supported policy actions focus on a limited number of sequenced, high-impact reforms that lead to development outcomes that are clearly defined and reflected in the DMF.

Ensuring the direct link between supported activities, outputs, and outcome, and relevance of their indicators is critical. For example, this program failed to achieve or achieved only in part some outcome indicators even though all planned outputs were delivered.

Without a comprehensive and robust design and monitoring framework (DMF) and without undertaking the necessary updates, the level of project achievements against targets cannot be ascertained. In this project, the scale and character of planned physical works in one scheme were substantially altered during implementation, but the impact of this change on project effectiveness cannot be properly captured by the indicators in the DMF. Similarly, without conducting baseline and impact assessments, the economic viability of project investments cannot be reliably established.

A more nuanced iteration of the project design and monitoring framework (DMF) i.e., accurately differentiating outcome and output indicators, would be beneficial to facilitate better project results assessments. As observed by this validation, impact, outcome, and output statements in the DMF were vague and similar, and did not provide sufficient guidance to focus performance targets that would have provided better evidence for achieving the goals of the impact, outcome, and output statements.

The practice at appraisal is to provide baseline information and the design and monitoring (DMF) outcome and output targets based on project inputs. In the case of this project, the DMF targets need to be project related. It used a target for the impact indicator that linked project output to the development of other projects. While it is possible to reasonably forecast results, the external capacity development may impact the outcomes.

A design and monitoring framework could become more useful and informative for assessment if it could include quantifiable indicators for capacity building when the requirement is identified during program appraisal.

The outcome performance indicator of a loan project that is deliberately designed to establish a reasonable cause-effect relationship between outputs and outcome can ensure a logical appropriateness and continuum of the design and monitoring framework results chain.

When designing results frameworks, the use of policy actions as results indicators should be minimized. If the indicator measures the reform success by the completion of the policy actions, it provides little information on the success of that policy action and undermines the relevance of the policy action for no result is achieved other than itself.