DEVELOPING AND PILOTING A METHODOLOGY FOR ASSESSING THE INDIRECT IMPACTS OF ADVISORY WORK

Development finance institutions invest heavily in advisory programs designed to improve policy frameworks, strengthen regulatory environments, and catalyze private investment, but demonstrating that those programs are actually working is genuinely difficult. The challenge is not measuring direct outputs, which are relatively straightforward to count, but attributing market-level change to a specific advisory intervention in a context where many factors are at play simultaneously. When the International Finance Corporation (IFC) wanted to capture the indirect private investment impacts of its Renewable Energy and Power Advisory Programs, it faced exactly this problem: operations teams had strong intuitions about the market development their work was enabling, but no rigorous, consistent methodology for documenting and attributing those impacts. IFC hired DHInfrastructure to develop one.

DHInfrastructure began by reviewing IFC's existing approaches to assessing indirect impacts and interviewing operations teams to understand how they thought about attribution and what data they were already collecting. Drawing on this foundation, we developed a monitoring and evaluation framework that defined the requirements for attributing indirect impact, identified the research questions operations teams needed to answer, and provided a guidance note and stakeholder survey to help teams integrate the new methodology into their existing evaluation practices. The framework was designed to be practical enough for operational teams to use without specialist evaluation expertise, while rigorous enough to produce defensible attribution claims.

IFC then asked DHInfrastructure to pilot the methodology across five countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, North Macedonia, and Kosovo. In each country, we interviewed IFC operations teams, private investors, and government officials to evaluate the indirect impact claims associated with IFC's advisory interventions, assessing whether and how those interventions had contributed to observable market development. We used the data collection tools we had developed to gather evidence on market changes and stakeholder sentiment, and provided IFC with detailed feedback on how the methodology performed in practice and how it could be refined for future use. We disseminated the lessons learned to IFC operations teams in other regions, ensuring that the insights from the pilot informed how the methodology would be applied more broadly.

The methodology developed through this engagement contributed to IFC’s broader effort to strengthen how it measures the catalytic and market-level impacts of advisory interventions. The pilot demonstrated that indirect impacts—such as increased investor confidence, policy implementation, market creation, and mobilization of private investment—could be assessed in a more systematic and evidence-based manner without imposing excessive reporting burdens on operational teams. The work aligned closely with IFC’s evolving Anticipated Impact Measurement and Monitoring framework and the institution’s wider emphasis on measuring market creation and systemic impact. Lessons from the pilot informed discussions within IFC about how advisory programs could better capture and substantiate their contribution to private sector development outcomes.