Year: 1993
Client: Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DGIS)
Country: Various developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin-America
Value TA: ? 148,000
The IPTA/OL programme is designed to stimulate commercial growth in developing countries with emphasis on small and medium sized enterprises. At the time of the evaluation the programme was active in more than 60 countries. The evaluation was implemented by a team of several evaluators. An approach was developed that focused on the output of the assistance (e.g. a feasibility study or a pilot project) and the subsequent use that was made of that output, if any. All members of the team were involved in the elaboration of the approach as well as the logic underlying the sampling techniques that were used in order to make sure that the study was done in comparable ways in the various countries and companies involved.
An interesting finding was that companies that had developed experience with finding external financial sources such as the IPTA/OL programme often didn?t make a successful further use of the output of the assistance while medium-sized (family) companies having less or no experience with this kind of external financial assistance sometimes had made a very successful use of it. However, it is difficult to target such a programme to the latter type of companies as they are difficult to find and once found, are hesitant to get engaged in the required paper work and/or to get involved at all