Evaluation of National Community Driven Development Project (NCDDP) Myanmar
Since January 2013, the Department of Rural Development (DRD) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation (MOALI) has been implementing the National Community Driven Development Project (NCDDP) with support from the World Bank and other development partners (DPs). The objective of the project is to enable poor rural communities to benefit from improved access to and use of basic infrastructure and services through a people-centered approach and to enhance the government’s capacity to respond promptly and effectively to an eligible crisis or emergency.
Project summary reports show that the project has made steady progress over the past few years and has already been implemented in 27 townships and is currently being expanded to additional 20 townships. Thus, by end of 2017, the project is expected to cover 8,800 villages across 47 townships in total, providing access to a broad range of basic community level infrastructure and services. As of the end of 2016, the project had generated 800,000 man-hours of paid labour, built or rehabilitated 900 schools, and built over 1,000 km of roads and footpaths. Disbursements under the NCDDP totalled $156 million as of early 2017 and there has seen a significant scale up financial contributions from DPs, and a commensurate expansion in the number of villages to be covered. All these factors suggest that the project is being effectively implemented.
While the NCDDP has been in existence since 2013, no baseline surveys or impact evaluations have been conducted in the years since the NCDDP commenced. In this context, the Development Assistance Coordination Unit (DACU) of the Government of Myanmar (GoM) has requested the support of the IGC in undertaking an independent impact evaluation of the NCDDP in line with DACU's mandate to ensure the optimal allocation and effectiveness of development assistance to Myanmar.
In order to prepare for the impact evaluation, a pilot survey was run to assess the feasibility of the methodology, to revise survey instruments, and to examine methods to improve the data collection process.