COOPERATION AMONG EVALUATION UNITS IN MULTILATERAL IFIs

1. COOPERATION AMONG EVALUATION UNITS INMULTILATERAL IFIs Gregory K. Ingram Chair, Evaluation Cooperation Group Marrakech – February, 2004

2. 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

3. ECG’s 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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

10. 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 ventures—sector wide approaches and budget support—virtually require joint evaluation • New frontiers in development evaluation are global programs and the aid system itself.