China - Inner Mongolia Local Railway Project

Ratings for the Community Child Care and Nutrition Project in Colombia are as follows: overall outcome of the project is rated as satisfactory, Bank performance revealed some deficiencies in monitoring and evaluation during the initial years of the Project life, primarily delays in implementation of the information and evaluation components; and frequent turnover among Colombian Institute for Family Welfare (ICBF) staff and in the Project Management Unit and the low priority given by ICBF to the Project, especially to monitoring and evaluation efforts, contributed to delays. Successive ICBF directors generally agreed, for example, to mount an impact evaluation, but never followed through to complete its design. Toward the end of the Project, ICBF interest in and commitment to the Project began to increase, and planned activities were completed. Some of the lessons learned from the project are as follows: 1) understanding both the political and institutional climate has important implications for the immediate impact of the project and sustainable outcomes. Projects such as this one that involve different participating institutions to support the achievement of Project objectives should establish agreements with authorities or institutions, and provision should be made for periodic review/revision /ratification of institutional arrangements or agreements throughout implementation. This is especially germane in the case of first time projects in sectors with weak or nonexistent institutional linkages at project inception; and 2) the scale and location of projects has a direct bearing on whether government agencies or non-government organization (NGOs) are better positioned to achieve optimal project results. Centralized procedures, characteristic of the older operations supported by the Bank and the Colombian Government, were poorly suited to a highly decentralized and participatory service delivery model such as the Child Care Homes Program (HBIs). In this case, the involvement of NGOs might have led to a greater project impact.