Promoting Country-led Development Evaluation
What is the role of donors?
Hans Lundgren
June 2009
Overview
• The country evaluation context• Donor role• Partnership and ownership• Evaluation capacity development • Ways forward
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The country context
• Evaluation demand related to domestic accountability needs
• The evaluation agenda in country will relate to the broader environment of governance, transparency requirements, and debate (or lack of it) on the effectiveness of public service and investments
• Aid to developing countries donor role
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How can donors support?
• Improving donor coordination and harmonisation, e.g. evaluation plan inventory
• Promoting joint and partner-led evaluation work • Supporting evaluation capacity development and
provide incentives for evaluation• Aligning with partner evaluation plans/needs and
using country systems• Sharing experience, guidance and norms
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Promoting or undermining ownership?
• Intended and unintended consequences of evaluation practice and processes
• Meeting needs of both partners and donors – not always feasible but possible more often than thought
• Partnership must move beyond passive participation ownership of evaluation agenda, design, process
• Why are there not more partner-led evaluations of donor programmes? Accountability asymmetry.
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What is evaluation capacity?
• Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD): unleashing, strengthening and maintaining evaluation capacity.
• Evaluation system: from setting the agenda to technical skills, demand for evaluation, design, feedback and learning, etc.
• 3 Levels of capacity:
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Resources
• Fact finding study on ECD (DAC/Japan, 2006)• Member and partner country experiences• Work by MDBs and UN, studies by IEG• IOCE publication “Creating and
Developing Evaluation Organisations” • DAC’s Good Practice document on
Capacity Development (2006)• UNICEF et al, “Country-led monitoring
and evaluation systems” (2008)• Evaluation tools, norms & standards
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Key emerging lessons
• An evaluation system needs to meet a country’s own learning and accountability needs.
• Donors can support, not export: capacity development processes must be country-led and tailored.
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Lessons (continued)
• Build capacity by doing joint evaluation work that meets partner (as well as donor) learning and accountability needs.
• Address supply and demand for evaluation (i.e. use by policy makers) to ensure evaluations are used
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How do we move forward?
• Change the way evaluations are planned and implemented – applying the Paris Declaration agenda to evaluation
• Explicitly consider the evaluation capacity dimension during the evaluation process
• Link with partners and find opportunities to collaborate in joint and partner-led work
• Direct and context-specific evaluation capacity development support
• Share experiences in collaborative networks
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