This Program Logic and Evaluability Assessment sought to answer the following questions:
1. Was the rationale for the investment justified?
2. Were the objectives well defined in the program logic and documentation?
3. What could have been better executed?
The evaluation team responded to the evaluation questions with the following:
1. The rationale for making the airport investment was reasonably well formulated. The problem was clearly identified in the Compact documents. A deficient airport in the capital of a landlocked country acts as a severe bottleneck for development and economic growth. The nature of the bottlenecks and constraints to growth had already been identified by previous government and World Bank documents. The justification for these types of projects is based on the hindrances and constraints that a badly functioning airport causes in a land-locked country with the characteristics of Mali. Such a project is due to yield better results on poverty reduction and economic growth the more the transport sector is integrated with other sectors which possess a more direct link to private sector development and job creation. These linkages between the productive sector and the transport sector were at the heart of the Compact, through the IP Project and the Alatona Irrigation Project.
However, the justification for the investments could have been made with greater accuracy (and thus some of the issues pointed out at a later stage could have been identified and solved earlier on). A constraints analysis was not conducted, which is a tool MCC now implements as part of the earlier stages of Compact design. The Airport Project made strong assumptions, while others were implicitly underrated, which were too often too optimistic (e.g. the case of assuming political stability).
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The Airport Project objectives were well defined given the defined program logic of intended impacts; but the logical framework was overly ambitious and extended the impact pathways too far, especially given that the IP project was removed, weakening the overall Compact ability to impact poverty. It was already acknowledged by the evidence back then, and by the Project documents, that the poverty impact of the Airport Project was somewhat far-fetched within the established period, since the basic driver (increased volume of aviation activity) will only be felt several years later, due to the inherently gradual nature of air traffic growth. Moreover, the Program logic was not very structured, in terms of clearly showing how the different activities connected to results at different levels (outputs, outcomes and impacts). The ToC was thus not sufficiently well integrated across the stream of results and was overly ambitious, leapfrogging from low-level activities and outputs to very high-level impacts of economic growth and poverty creation.
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The risk analysis was weak. It did not sufficiently take into account existing risks, nor proposed adequate mitigation measures.
There was also little focus on sustainability issues, and the way assumptions, risks and mitigation strategies were formulated also illustrates this. Risks and assumptions were thus not clearly defined, along with potential risk mitigation strategies.
Traffic projections are considered excessively optimistic. According to the available information at the time, it was already known that internally (for most residents at least), response of demand to variations in price was limited, due to the lack of purchasing power and the high concentration of wealth in the country. Known elasticities were very low, indicating that in Mali a demand response to price was not very elastic (as tourism demand also depends on other factors such as the quality of local airports, road and tourism services), so traffic projections (which came from the Tourism Authority) could have been calibrated to account for a more cautious scenario.