Specificity of intended outcome is essential to enable programming, innovation, and cycles of project improvement. The project’s outcomes were broadly defined and lacked clear pathways detailing how the outputs would interact with each other and achieve the outcomes. The vagueness is likely part of the reason that the design had significant gaps and flawed assumptions on how the activities would lead to the intended outcomes.
Targets need to be specific and evidence-based and indicators well-defined and measurable to enable a reliable assessment of implementation progress and project accomplishments and performance at completion. This project suffered from weaknesses in indicators and the results chain. Examples were inadequate links between intended outputs and outcome, lack of specific targets (output 1 and outcome), and poorly defined target (output 3). One impact target was misplaced (project staffing) and another was deemed unachievable (number of WUCSs confirming receipt of water services).
An adequate assessment is needed when setting targets. This project had a few design challenges that could not be addressed during implementation. For the target of serving 3,000 households with new water supply connections and 4,500 with improved ones, financing was not included in the approved project, so could never be achieved. The target of serving 25,000 households with sewer connections was ambitious, as only about 13,680 households would get these connections based on the final engineering designs.