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The importance of field survey in ODA evaluation
“The Evaluation on Japan’s Assistance to Connectivity in the Mekong Region with a Focus on the Southern Economic Corridor” was carried out for one of the third-party ODA evaluations in FY 2017. The evaluation team conducted a field study in the three countries, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
The word “Southern Economic Corridor” may remind in some people of local reports made by a journalist who travelled the entire length of the corridor for a television program called Future Century ZIPANGU broadcasted in 2015. The Southern Economic Corridor refers to the major route that connects Bangkok, Thailand with Vung Tau, Vietnam, via Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.
Over the years, Japan has provided various forms of assistance in the Southern Economic Corridor. This includes hard infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and port facilities, soft infrastructure projects that facilitates transportation and trade, establishment of systems and legislation related to this infrastructure, human resources development, and regional development in the surrounding area. This evaluation looked at how this assistance reinforced connections in the southern corridor and contributed to the development of Mekong region.
The study found that within the Southern Economic Corridor customs clearance took the longest at the Vietnam-Cambodia border. To support this finding, a rather unique attempt was made to drive the national roads of the Southern Economic Corridor to learn about local issues through first-hand experiences.
After witnessing the line-up of trucks at the border, the evaluation team found the causes of this congestion to be a shortage of dry ports for transshipment of goods and trucks awaiting inspections backed up from the customs office to the road because customs had only one cargo inspection machine. As a result, it was recommended to consider to build a bypass route to customs and provide inspection machines, to strengthen streamlining distribution and trade.
