Ex-Post Evaluation: USAID/India FIRE-D Project
From 1994 to 2011, USAID’s Financial Institutions Reform and Expansion–Debt and Infrastructure (FIRE-D) activity partnered with India’s central, state, and municipal governments in 16 states to expand sustainable water and sanitation access to the poor, while improving the ability of city and state governments to mobilize resources and increase their revenues.
The evaluation team followed up on six states and cities seven years after FIRE-D ended to understand how urban WatSan services have changed and to what extent policies, practices, and financing mechanisms introduced through FIRE-D have been sustained. Lessons from this evaluation are intended to inform USAID activity design improvements in India and other urban WatSan contexts.
About The Ex-Post Evaluation Series
The USAID Water Office is conducting a series of independent ex-post evaluations of the Agency’s water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) activities to inform future USAID investments in the sector and to better understand the long-term impact and sustainability of its interventions several years after projects close.
This evaluation series will help USAID understand whether and how its activity results have been sustained. All activities included in the series must have been closed for a minimum of three years and could not be recipients of Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance or Food for Peace funding. Preference is given to USAID missions that are at a point in their design cycle to incorporate learnings into upcoming WASH programs.
This evaluation series builds upon USAID and Rotary International’s WASH Sustainability Index Tool, a framework to assess a WASH activity’s likelihood to be sustainable according to the following factors: availability of finance for sanitation; local capacity for construction and maintenance of latrines; the influence of social norms; and governance.