In 2015, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) partnered with the Government of Liberia (GoL) to help address the country’s insufficient access to reliable and affordable electricity. Under MCC’s compact with the GoL, the $202 million Energy Project aims to modernize Liberia’s energy network, extend access to electricity, and improve the quality and reliability of the country’s power system. MCC has contracted with MPR to to conduct independent evaluations of the four activities within the Energy Project; the report outlines the proposed evaluation design of two of the activities: (1) the Mt Coffee Rehabilitation Activity, which has repaired and expanded the Mt Coffee Hydroelectric Power Plant to provide an installed generation capacity of 88MW, and (2) the Capacity Building and Sector Reform Activity, which will support the creation of an independent regulatory agency, provide management oversight to the Liberia Electricity Corporation (LEC), and strengthen the capacity of LEC.
Mathematica has proposed a comprehensive mixed method approach. Mathematica will examine outcomes at the level of overarching implementation, grid-level, energy sector, end user, and utility-level. For overarching questions, Mathematica will use interviews with key informants, site visits, and reviews of relevant documents to conduct a timeline analysis to track the implementation of Compact activities and sub-activities for its performance evaluation. For the performance analysis of grid-level, energy sector, end-user, and utility outcomes, Mathematica will draw on LEC’s available administrative data for a longitudinal analysis of repeated quantitative measures, and will combined these data with qualitative data such as key informant interviews and document reviews. For the performance evaluation to measure end user outcomes, Mathematica will implement a survey-based pre-post design using retrospective data on pre-intervention for previously connected households and larger energy users.