Audit of USAID/Egypt"s monitoring of small projects

The audit focuses on three projects having obligations totaling $35 million and authorizations totaling $45 million: Export Enterprise Development; Small Enterprise Credit; and Technical Support for Sector Policy Reform. As of 6/95, $14.8 million had been spent on the three projects, primarily on TA ($5.6 million), a loan fund for the credit project ($5 million), and on support for an NGO promoting exports ($3.1 million). USAID/E was monitoring all three projects so as to ensure that planned outputs and objectives were being achieved, except that in the Export Enterprise Development project a key indicator on export generation needed to be better defined, and in the Small Enterprise Credit project (despite otherwise impressive results), the Mission was not measuring whether a key output, financial self-sufficiency, was being achieved. As for the Technical Support for Sector Policy Reform project, although USAID/E was monitoring the project"s activities, only general, nonspecific outputs and objectives had been established. The audit recommends that USAID/E: (1) establish baseline data on exports for firms assisted by the project (or develop an alternative indicator for the project objective); (2) measure whether the loan program was achieving self-sufficiency; and (3) establish specific outputs and objectives for the Technical Support project before any additional funds are approved. The Mission generally agreed with the audit findings. (Author abstract, modified)