Beneficiary assessment
Beneficiary Assessment is "an approach to information gathering which assesses the value of an activity as it is perceived by its principal users" (2002:1). It was developed and used by the World Bank from 1987 onwards. It generates information about how beneficiaries value the World Bank's work.
It uses a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. Methods have to be tailored "to the nature of the development activity, the beneficiaries, the managers and the phase of the activity" (2002:1). So there are no standard approaches. Each assessment must "have a framework that allows for quantification of the data gathered" (2002:8).
By 1998, a total of 120 World Bank projects had implemented Beneficiary Assessments. This increased to over 300 by 2002. On average, the assessments took around four months to complete and cost approx US$40,000 (2002 prices). (2002:15)
Results
In 1999, a report summarised 10 Beneficiary Assessments of agricultural extension programmes in Africa. The assessments generated clear findings: the programmes increased farmer adoption of new techniques and this increased productivity. Farmers who were not directly contacted by extension programmes did not benefit and women were particularly excluded. Farmers' recommendations for improvements were summarised.
There are strong findings about the impact of Beneficiary Assessments from specific implementations. The 1998 review reports that, the majority of task managers who supervised this listening work say "When the World Bank has listened systematically to its clients, the quality of its operations has improved significantly." (1998:17)
The 1999 review also finds that "Generally, Task Managers stated that [it] was an extremely useful tool for ... making mid-course changes to their projects or in designing subsequent projects." (1999:2) They also said that the benefits outweighed the costs and they intended to repeat them.
However, in 1998 there was insufficient data to demonstrate the impact of the approach for more than 10 projects. These 10 showed 'undoubted quantitative value added'. (1998:17) No more compelling data was reported in 2002.
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