Access to Markets Project - Independent Performance Evaluation 2016
Benin, 2016
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BEN_2016_MCC-AM_v01_M
Access to Markets Project - Independent Performance Evaluation 2016
| Name | Country code |
|---|---|
| Benin | BEN |
Independent Performance Evaluation
In 2006, the Millennium Challenge Corporation signed a five-year, $307 million Compact with the Government of Benin aimed at increasing investments and private sector activity through the implementation of four projects. One of these projects aimed at improving "access to markets" by eliminating physical and procedural constraints currently hindering the flow of goods through the Port of Cotonou. The Access to Markets project completed several substantive activities, including: construction of a new south wharf; extension of a sand-stopping jetty estimated to save the Port over $2.1 USD million spent annually on dredging;9 provision of a tugboat; construction of 2,462 meters of road, 1,584 meters of rail, and five access gates upgraded to better control security of personnel and vehicles accessing the port and circulation around the port; installation of new fire protection and security systems; modernization of customs operations and improved port procedures supported by investments in new hardware, software, communications and training personnel; implementation of a management information system and a centralized automated customs system to monitor all customs operations in real time; and the acquisition and implementation of pollution control equipment.
The Access to Markets Project was designed to improve port performance and security, expand capacity, and reduce port operating costs, thereby reducing overall transport costs which facilitate economic growth through increased specialization, product quality and trade.
The project evaluation began in summer 2015, nearly four years after the closeout, providing ample time to detect effects of these operational changes. Because it was a single-site project, with no clearly identifiable counterfactual, MCC and the evaluators agreed to conduct a performance evaluation of the project implementation, focusing on a set of research questions grouped into seven categories: Competitiveness, Trade, Efficiency, Costs, Employment, Corruption and other Unanticipated Impacts. The analyses of these questions rely on:
- Existing port activity records;
- Private sector activity records;
- Port Investment literature reviews;
- Focus Group discussions with port users and dwellers; and
- Key informant interviews (with Benin government officials and private sector actors).
A detailed evaluation design report is provided as related materials and available on MCC’s evaluation catalog.
Version
- v01: Edited, anonymous dataset for public distribution.
Scope
The MCC formulated research questions which guided the performance evaluation. These research questions are categorized into topics related to “key anticipated results” including: competiveness, trade volume, operational efficiency, costs, integra-tion of internal markets, employment, corruption, unanticipated impacts, monitoring and process questions, and lessons learned and recommendations.
| Topic |
|---|
| Transportation |
Coverage
Port of Cotonou
Producers and sponsors
| Name | Affiliation |
|---|---|
| NORC at the University of Chicago | NORC |
| Name |
|---|
| Millennium Challenge Corporation |
Survey instrument
The NORC team designed its evaluation to identify and measure accomplishments that resulted from the MCC investment, to assess specific performance issues which had a material effect on project outcomes, to analyze various constraints to the full and successful implementation of the project, and, importantly as well, to extract lessons which were learned during the implementation process.
In general, the research methods which the NORC project team applied in assessing each of the selected performance parameters entailed the collection of empirical evidence that responds to each of the key evaluation questions that the team committed itself to investigate. Most of the evaluation assessments entailed “before” and “after” comparisons. Others involved comparisons vis-à-vis relevant regional or global benchmarks. Quantitative assessments were then applied to contextualize, explain, and elaborate using subjective but expert assessments of key informant interviews and focus group discussions.
Data collection
| Start | End |
|---|---|
| 2016-02-01 | 2016-04-08 |
| Name |
|---|
| NORC at the University of Chicago |
Program implementation concluded by October 2011. Final data collection was completed in September 2016.
In general, the project team had significant issues obtaining much of the essential data, including data from the PAC (Port of Cotonou). Much of the data that was received was only obtained very late in the assessment, which delayed the finalization of the methodology and created redundancies in conducting analysis. Key data received regarding operational efficiency and level of service was only provided through annual reports, which were sometimes in Word or PDF format, which further complicated the data collection process. The PAC often only provided data through 2013 or 2014 depending on the indicator, which does not allow us to fully assess the impact of the investment including the impacts of the operation of the South terminal. The PAC was not willing to provide additional data and did not respond to follow-up requests by the project team.
The most important challenge is that despite significant efforts to establish complete time-series datasets, there are gaps in the datasets for many of the most important indicators. Unfortunately we are missing too many data points to have continuous time series data for many of the indicators. For example, ship productivity is one of the most important indicators, but data for this indicator was not an M&E indicator and was only accessible for the period from 2006 to 2009 for the North Terminal and 2015 to June 2016 for the South terminal. Similarly, very little data exists on truck delays and turn time, so we cannot quantitatively analyze whether changes in port capacity affected congestion. Instead, qualitative assessments from interviews and focus group discussions will have to fill in these gaps, especially in terms of attribution and describing exogenous factors that may be affecting port performance.
Data appraisal
MCC’s flawed logic and assumptions suggest that investment in incremental port capacity should lead directly to positive economic returns measured in terms of job creation in Benin’s manufacturing, agribusiness processing and non-port service sectors. An extensive literature suggests otherwise: investment in port infrastructure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic growth. MCC acknowledges that a more rigorous constraint analysis upstream could have determined that neither port capacity nor efficiency were binding constraints to growth.
The M&E indicators should contain measures of port operational efficiency, which are key measures of port performance. The timing of the baseline data for evaluation should be linked to the timing of the program implementation.
Access policy
Millennium Challenge Corporation
Millennium Challenge Corporation
https://data.mcc.gov/evaluations/index.php/catalog/182
Cost: None
Data Access
Use of the dataset must be acknowledged using a citation which would include:
- the Identification of the Primary Investigator
- the title of the survey (including country, acronym and year of implementation)
- the survey reference number
- the source and date of download
Contacts
| Name | |
|---|---|
| Monitoring & Evaluation Division of the Millennium Challenge Corporation | impact-eval@mcc.gov |
Metadata production
DDI_BEN_2016_MCC-AM_v01_M
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Millennium Challenge Corporation | Review of Metadata |
| NORC at the University of Chicago | Independent Evaluator |
2016-12-08
Metadata version
Version 2 (June 2020)
2020-06-08
Version 1.0 (Original 2016-12-08)
Version 2. Edited version based on Version 1 (DDI-MCC-BEN-NORC-PORT-2016) that was done by the Millennium Challenge Corporation.