Evaluation of International Executive Service Corps

Special evaluation covers the period through 12/80 and is based on document review; visits to Ecuador, Peru, Thailand, and Indonesia; and interviews with IESC staff, volunteers, and clients, with A.I.D. and LDC officials, and with others. The IESC program continues to provide valuable services to client firms, while also making secondary contributions such as increased employment and expanded domestic and external trade. IESC's programming process, especially project selection and preparation, has become more formal and more reflective of government and private sector priorities than in the past, and a new evaluation process - the Client Assistance Review (CAR) - has been established and is eliciting information on IESC impacts at both client and broader levels. Over 235 CAR's have been completed, with another 260 in process. The percentage of IESC projects in the small business category (firms with fewer than 150 employees and gross sales of $50,000-$3,000,000) has grown significantly. Additional funds are being made available for businesses at the lower end of the scale, since greater emphasis is now placed on gearing client contributions to ability to pay, but projects with firms over the $3 million level will still be needed to subsidize services to small firms. Pilot projects with promising smaller (below $50,000) firms are recommended to provide experience on which to base future decisions vis-a-vis serving smaller businesses. Some 20% of IESC projects are in the government sector (public administration, health and education, and public corporations). Such projects assume considerable importance in countries such as Indonesia, where public corporations play a dominant role, but their overall impact - as compared to that of private sector projects - is not known. It is recommended, inter alia, that IESC: continue to refine its programming process, especially with regard to developing coherent programs at the country-level; evaluate a series of public sector projects to get some measure of their relative effectiveness; conduct case studies to measure overall IESC impacts in individual countries; reduce turnover among country program directors; and seek increased contributions from U.S. businesses.