Data availability and baselines

The assessment of benefits from new or renovated irrigation systems cannot be meaningfully compiled without detailed farm budgets (cropping patterns, yields, production costs, farm-gate prices).

The selection of a single year as the baseline against which to measure the reduction in losses due to severe climate events is problematic. Since such events vary considerably from year to year, selecting a single year as the baseline can lead to distorted results. An alternative approach is to take the average of several years as the baseline. Another more meaningful alternative is to compare losses in areas protected by project works with similar neighboring areas without such works.

A well-designed project performance management system greatly facilitates the identification, quantification, and valuation of economic benefits, and help in evaluating the extent of the project’s effectiveness.

Designing a project with an intention to conduct an impact evaluation can lead to a more conscious effort to design and establish a robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system where data can be available for such impact assessment. Additionally, having gender targets can help influence the M&E design to be gender inclusive.

The design and effective implementation of a project performance monitoring system is essential to the economic and financial evaluation of water supply and sanitation projects. The collection of benefits data helps in the identification, quantification, and valuation of economic and financial benefits for evaluation during and after project completion

A project performance management system (PPMS), which was not included in the project design, could have been beneficial for identifying, quantifying, and valuing economic benefits, and help in evaluating the extent of the project’s effectiveness and sustainability

A well-designed and functioning project performance monitoring system (PPMS) is critical for the monitoring of project performance and collecting data for economic analyses (among other information). Given the data issues persistent in the Pacific e.g., availability and quality of data, careful thought on designing a comprehensive but implementable i.e., “fit for purpose” PPMS is imperative upon project teams. This can enable better data collection, which can facilitate better post-evaluation.

A well-designed monitoring and evaluation system helps ensure proper attribution of project investments to the achieved outcomes, at project completion. Specifically, a monitoring and evaluation system, with sufficient and dedicated staff, could monitor and assess pertinent project-related data. These help in corroborating that systematically gathered information during implementation is indeed the result of a project’s intervention.

A project performance monitoring system (PPMS) based only on implementation and gender data has limited usefulness. To adequately evaluate the impact of a project and estimate its economic internal rate of return that reflects the primary and secondary benefits of the project, a PPMS needs to include the economic data of project beneficiaries, e.g., avoided economic losses.

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.