COOPERATION AMONG EVALUATION UNITS IN MULTILATERAL IFIs

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COOPERATION AMONG EVALUATION UNITS
INMULTILATERAL IFIs

• Gregory K. Ingram
• Chair, Evaluation Cooperation Group
• Marrakech February, 2004

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Background

• Established in 1996 to strengthen cooperation
  among IFI
• Evaluators and to and to harmonize evaluation
  methodologies,
• the ECG includes as members
• African Development Bank
• Asian Development Bank
• European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
• European Investment Bank
• Inter-American Development Bank Group
• International Monetary Fund
• World Bank Group
• And as Observers Chairs of U.N. Evaluation Group
  and of OECD/DAC Evaluation Network

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ECGs mandate

• Strengthen the use of evaluation for greater
  development effectiveness and accountability
• Share and disseminate lessons learned
• Harmonize performance indicators, methods, and
  approaches
• Enhance evaluation professionalism of members and
  collaborate with evaluation units in bilateral
  and multilateral institutions
• Facilitate partner countries involvement in
  evaluations and promote in-country evaluation
  capacity development

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Good Practice Standards to harmonize project
evaluation

• Good Practice Standards agreed for evaluation
  of Private Sector Operations (2001) and Public
  Sector Operations (2002)
• Evaluation practices for private sector
  investment operations benchmarked on Good
  Practice Standards in 2002 updated in 2004
• Good Practice Standards to be used to
  benchmark Public Sector Operations evaluation
  practice

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Shared approaches to new topics

• Policy Based Lending A paper underway
  summarizes
• existing evaluation practices among MDBs for
  policy
• based (including adjustment) lending
• Country Programs Members are sharing
  approaches for evaluating country programs
• Evaluability Developing criteria to design
  operations and policies so they can be
  evaluated in a results oriented framework

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Governance and practice

• ECG members share information on their
  governance, oversight, independence, budgets,
  and work programs (www.ecgnet.org)
• Independence has increased Many ECG
  members now report directly to their Boards
  and have more independent budget processes
• ECG members promote self-evaluation as an
  input into their independent evaluations

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Capacity building and training

• Participate in the International Program for
  Development Evaluation Training
• Provide MDB-to-MDB support to transfer
  evaluation skills and facilitate harmonization
• Collaborate in building evaluation capacity in
  Africa, with support from bilateral donors
  (Norway, Switzerland, The Netherlands, DFID)
• Support evaluation professionalism, such as
  through the International Development
  Evaluation Association

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Joint evaluation activities

• Country programs Peru, Lesotho, Rwanda
• Sectors Ghana transport
• Thematic topics the Comprehensive
  Development Framework, Poverty Reduction
  Strategy PapersEmphasis has been on joint
  processes more than on joint products, and on
  reducing evaluation costs to client countries.

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Work program priorities

• Country program and country assistance
  evaluation methodology
• Policy based lending evaluation methodology
• Evaluation capacity development
• Promoting clarification of and synergy between
  independent evaluation and self evaluation
• Evaluability assessments of operations and
  policies

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Going forward

• Harmonizing evaluation is greatly facilitated
  by harmonization of upstream operations
• Recent evaluations, such as that of the CDF,
  find much scope for harmonization in
  operations
• Joint aid venturessector wide approaches and
  budget supportvirtually require joint
  evaluation
• New frontiers in development evaluation are
  global programs and the aid system itself.