COOPERATION AMONG EVALUATION UNITS IN MULTILATERAL 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 (  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 Papers Emphasis 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.