Thorough infrastructure design reviews are essential to competent program management, efficient and effective implementation, and achievement of results. Numerous infrastructure-related problems highlighted by the independent evaluation stem from inadequate designs, improper design review and overall program management challenges; these include cost overruns and delays during implementation, and malfunctioning works that required either costly remediation by the Lesotho Water and Sewerage Company (WASCO) (i.e., the urban water utility) or complete abandonment. Typically, projects are managed and designs are reviewed and approved by the entity that will ultimately own the works, i.e., WASCO in this case. However, the due diligence assessment carried out during compact development determined that WASCO lacked sufficient capacity to perform this function, so MCC required that a program management unit be established to perform overall program management, including design reviews. This was a separate contract, procured and managed by the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) Lesotho. MCA-Lesotho eventually brought the program management function in-house because they were dissatisfied with the firm contracted for that role. The decision to approve this change prioritized MCC’s commitment to country ownership over its responsibility to provide technical oversight, ultimately to the detriment of the project. MCC, as an agency, continues to value country ownership; however, the following changes in MCC’s practice should help ensure the tradeoff between country ownership and technical oversight does not result in similar failures in the future. First, the agency was restructured in 2014 such that functions are now organized into discrete practice groups that are led by a Practice Lead/Senior Director (PLSD). PLSDs are experts in their technical areas who are positioned to amplify MCC’s oversight role by advising on issues like this and bolstering technical arguments made on country teams and to MCC management. Second, as of 2015, MCC also requires a comprehensive, competent design review of all planned infrastructure. While this had been inconsistently practiced previously, it became required in 2015, with the allocation of compact funds for external design reviews when design review capacity is considered insufficient in the partner country. Furthermore, during implementation, country teams should consider whether to condition funding approvals on the program continuing to meet the specified quality and adequacy of the construction supervisor and project manager each quarter. In addition, clearly spelling out the relationships between the various contractors involved in an infrastructure project in their contracts should help facilitate these oversight processes.
Lesson Learned