Text Analysis of Project Completion Reports

Project Completion Reports (PCRs) are the main instrument through which different multilateral organizations measure the success of a project once it closes. PCRs are important for development effectiveness as they serve to understand achievements, failures, and challenges within the project cycle they can feed back into the design and execution of new projects. The aim of this paper is to introduce text analysis tools for the exploration of PCR documents. We describe and apply different text analysis tools to explore the content of a sample of PCRs. We seek to illustrate a way in which PCRs can be summarized and analyzed using innovative tools applied to a unique dataset. We believe that the methods presented in this investigation have numerous potential applications to different types of text documents routinely prepared within the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).