Vietnam and Japan evaluate projects’ results

According to JICA, this joint final workshop demonstrated the achievement of the one-year activity for the Joint Evaluation Programme 2010, which aims to harmonise the evaluation mechanisms and strengthen the institutional capacity of the MPI and agencies responsible for Monitoring and Evaluation through joint evaluations on JICA-funded projects in the transportation and power sector.

This year, a new implementation structure of joint evaluation was introduced based on the accumulation of the three-year experience to fully transfer evaluation ownership to the Vietnamese side: the Vietnamese evaluators (Consultant) and the Evaluation team members from the project related agency have conducted the primary evaluation and then Japanese evaluator has conducted the secondary evaluation on the primary one.

Through this process, the government officials and evaluators have gained more knowledge and experiences to conduct the evaluations by their own. In addition to this, the four years cooperation in joint evaluation programme between 2007 and 2010, which accomplished total eleven ex-post project evaluation and remarkable human resource development on evaluation both in government and private sector, was reviewed by the Japanese evaluator.

The primary evaluation results for the two evaluated projects, Tan Son Nhat International Airport Terminal Construction Project and Dai Ninh Hydropower Project, were presented by officers involved in the respective projects, who are members of the Evaluation Team.

Both projects were evaluated to be highly satisfactory, and the preliminary ratings given for the projects were “A”, which are the highest of the four rating scales in JICA evaluation system. The preliminary results of the secondary evaluations by the Japanese evaluators were also the same as the Vietnamese evaluation team.

The evaluation results of Tan Son Nhat International Airport Terminal Construction Project shows that the project fulfilled its objectives: to meet the increasing air transportation demand and to improve the convenience and efficiency of the airport users by constructing a new international passenger terminal building with associated facilities at Tan Son Nhat International Airport.

Meanwhile the evaluation results of Dai Ninh Hydropower Projectshowed the good achievement of the three expected outcomes, namely, meeting the increasing power demand, enhancement of irrigation agriculture in Binh Thuan Province, and improvement of living standard of project-affected indigenous people in Lam Dong Province, by construction of the 300MW Dai Ninh Hydropower Plant together with a number of small-scale development projects in forestry, agriculture, education, health and culture sectors under the Indigenous People Development Programme.

Since it started operation in 2008, Dai Ninh Hydropower Plant has generated average 1,183GWh every year. After Dai Ninh Plant, water is provided to the 30MW Bach Binh Hydropower Plant, constructed downstream Dai Ninh Plant, to generate additional 114GWh per year, and then utilized for agriculture in Bach Binh district, which added approx. 2,000 ha of irrigated land after the project.

In the course of four years’ cooperation by JICA, the government of Vietnam has developed the evaluation system, institutional capacity and human resources which lead the evaluation on the Vietnamese Public Investment Project including ODA projects by their own.

Vietnamese Investment Evaluation Association (VIEA) is expected to be launched soon. Now, with those changes, the new step toward evaluation in Vietnam can be made. The MPI and JICA are expecting that the evaluation will make difference on the further social and economic development in Vietnam.