Contributed articles and some papers presented at the Regional Seminar-cum-Cluster Country Meeting on Participatory Planning on Rural Infrastructure, held in New Delhi, India in 1998; organized by Asian Institute of Transport Development; articles with reference to South and Southeast Asia.

What are the linkages between rural infrastructure investments and household welfare? In the past most of the evaluations to assess the effectiveness of a project focused on physical outputs and success of project implementation. In recent years, more attention has been given to the impact of investments, particularly its effect on the poor, both in economic and noneconomic terms. Songco presents findings from a survey of the existing literature on such impacts.Although evidence exists for improved household welfare from rural infrastructure investment, little evidence was found of studies that provided concrete linkages between specific investments in rural infrastructure and increased welfare of the rural poor. This is due in part to the complexity, and oftentimes the concurrent nature of interventions, that make attributing welfare improvements to a particular project virtually impossible.The evidence is presented in this three-part paper. Part I gives examples of past and current attempts to assess the impact of rural infrastructure projects and provides suggestions for future evaluations. Part II discusses in detail some observed economic and noneconomic impacts on the poor from different rural infrastructure interventions. Part III presents lessons learned from the literature on how to maximize the impact of rural infrastructure interventions on household welfare. Specific project and country examples from the literature and new data from a recent qualitative study in Vietnam are presented as evidence for and illustration of key ideas and issues.This paper - a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Sector Unit, East Asia and Pacific Region - is part of a larger effort in the region to evaluate the welfare impact of investments. The author may be contacted at [email protected].

A change in the transport sector's current approach to selecting rural road investments is warranted. A proposed approach builds on some of the poverty-focused "hybrid" methods found in recent rural road appraisals, recognizing that an important share of the benefits to the poor from rural roads cannot be measured in monetary terms.

"Rural infrastructure is critical to both economic and social development. Its absence thwarts growth and, typically, the poor are those hurt the most. The purpose of this paper is to serve as a basis for knowledge management on rural infrastructure." In the 1970s, the primary, if not the unique, objective of rural infrastructure lending was to get rural infrastructure built. However, the institutional aspects of how this infrastructure was to be built, and later how it would be operated and maintained, did not receive much attention. Only recently has poverty alleviation through employment creation become an explicit objective of rural infrastructure investments. This review tracks the poverty alleviation objective of rural infrastructure projects using three criteria: 1. whether poverty was an explicit criterion in the selection of specific sub-projects; 2. whether poverty was addressed in the pricing of rural infrastructure services; and 3. whether poverty was addressed through the creation of employment.

Despite the billions of dollars spent on development assistance each year, there is still very little known about the actual impact of projects on the poor. There is broad evidence on the benefits of economic growth, investments in human capital, and the provision of safety nets for the poor. But for a specific program or project in a given country, is the intervention producing the intended benefits and what was the overall impact on the population? Could the program or project be better designed to achieve the intended outcomes? Are resources being spent efficiently? These are the types of questions that can only be answered through an impact evaluation, an approach which measures the outcomes of a program intervention in isolation of other possible factors. This handbook seeks to provide project managers and policy analysts with the tools needed for evaluating project impact. It is aimed at readers with a general knowledge of statistics. For some of the more in-depth statistical methods discussed, the reader is referred to the technical literature on the topic. Chapter 1 presents an overview of concepts and methods. Chapter 2 discusses key steps and related issues to consider in implementation. Chapter 3 illustrates various analytical techniques through a case study. Chapter 4 includes a discussion of lessons learned from a rich set of "good practice" evaluations of poverty projects which have been reviewed for this handbook.