Impact Evaluation at MCC Introduction – Brief overview of M&E at MCC

Roads Project Evaluation - Ghana –Less opportunity for randomization, except potentially with respect to timing –Obtain list of prioritized roads in all districts Compare market price of maize at local market X, which is scheduled for new feeder road, with that at market Y, which already has feeder road Examine that comparison before and after completion of new road. Compare across districts where new feeder roads have been completed and not been completed. Try to look at impact resulting from building roads in areas with and without Farmer-Based Organizations (FBOs).

Roads Project Evaluation - Georgia Rehabilitation of the Samtskhe-Javakheti Road Approx. 250 km – Tbilisi to Akhaltsikhe and down to the Turkish and Armenian borders Will connect Tbilisi with the S-J region, an area with significant agricultural and tourism potential, but currently isolated with limited economic activity and high poverty Rehabilitation/ Construction slated to begin in Spring 2007 Expected benefits: increased agricultural production and trade, improved transport accessibility, reduced ethnic and cultural isolation

Roads Project Evaluation- Georgia – Cont. Impact Evaluation: Independent Evaluator – NORC/ University of Chicago Methodology - Propensity Score Match with Double-Difference Use of GIS data to calculate an “accessibility index” for each village surrounding the road, which becomes a key variable in determining treatment and control groups in the PSM analysis Because access index is a continuous measure, the variance between treatment and control groups is continuous, and provides a more robust measure than a binary division between the groups Key impact variables: poverty rate and average household income of villages in the treatment and control groups Combined approach and models will measure not only project impact on economic growth and poverty reduction, but also will allow for the prediction of economic impacts of future road projects in Georgia and study of interaction effects between S-J road project and other donor interventions in roads and agriculture