Governance of Transport Corridors in OIC Member States:
Challenges, Cases and Policy Lessons
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7.1.6 Corridor performance monitoring and dissemination
Without no MoU, it is no surprise that no corridor or governance performance monitoring is in place
for the corridor yet. On a national level, UNESCAP notes that
“very few countries have established their own sustainable mechanism to monitor the effectiveness of
trade […] Most trade and transport facilitation monitoring efforts have been ad-hoc, expensive and
dependent on external, rather than national, human and financial resources”53
To address the issue of a lack of evidence based policy making, UNESCAP, together with the ADB,
recently developed the Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism (TTFMM). The goal of
TTFMM is to improve the measurement of trade facilitation to identify accurate trade facilitation
interventions. The methods include business process analysis, time-cost-distance survey approach
and time release studies. Currently, the effectiveness of the TTFMM framework is being tested in
baseline studies, as was recently undertaken for Bangladesh54, Bhutan55 and Nepal56. Ideally, each
member arranges their monitoring mechanism according to the TTFMM system. However, this
requires effort by the members in terms of expansion of monitoring, national capacity building,
institutional arrangements, resources, continuation and its alignment with other global or regional
systems.57
Specifically for the Central Corridor, it is noted in the draft MoU for the Eurasian corridors that the
Action Plan will be updated annually, based on a close performance monitoring of the corridor. The
selected parameters for monitoring are to be agreed upon by the participants. TTFMM provides a
specific approach of how to monitor the corridor performance. With respect to governance
monitoring, UNESCAP launched a Monitoring and Evaluation - Policy and Guidelines in August 2017.
The programme sets out rules for monitoring and evaluating all UNESCAP governance institutions and
is based on the rules developed by the United Nation’s Evaluation Group
7.1.7 Promotion and stakeholder consultation
Currently the main challenge for UNESCAP is the promotion of the Eurasian corridor to national
governments for establishing a MoU. Promotion to other stakeholder for specific projects is a
secondary issue. Eventually, the aim is to set up a public website were information is published on the
status of the corridor and the progress made so far.
7.1.8 Capacity building: technical assistance and studies
Similarly, there is no specific capacity building programme for the Central Corridor in place yet. But
UNESCAP has a long tradition of capacity building in relation to transport in the region. It has various
technical assistance and training programmes running for all the UNESCAP members alongside the
development of the corridor, all geared towards enhancing the managerial, institutional and technical
capacity of its members58.
One of the training programmes relates to the promotion of the performance monitoring strategy
developed by UNESCAP, the TTFMM59. The aim of training is to educate the participants on the value
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54 Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism in Bangladesh (2017).
55 Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism in Bhutan (2017).
56 Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism in Nepal (2017).
57 Trade and Transport Facilitation Monitoring Mechanism in Bangladesh (2017).
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