IFAD participated in the 31st Annual Conference “From Learning to Action" of the American Evaluation Association (AEA), which took place on November 6 to 11 in Washington, D.C.

Mr Fabrizio Felloni, Deputy Director, IOE, hosted a poster presentation on decentralizing for better development result - the evaluation of IFAD's decentralization experience. The session focused on main findings and recommendations of the recently released corporate-level evaluation on decentralization experience. The decentralization process started in 2003 at IFAD.  By bringing IFAD closer to the country development context and actors, this was expected to improve project and strategy design and implementation support and improve donor coordination. 

Also, Mr Felloni, moderated  the session on self and independent evaluation systems: experiences from international financial institutions – The case of the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Bank. In the session Mr Felloni and Ms Natalia Toschi, Senior Results Specialist, IFAD, held a joint presentation on Self and independent evaluation function at IFAD with the Independent Evaluation Group of World Bank. The panel compared  the experience of IFAD and the World Bank and discussed the evolution of self and independent evaluation systems, how they have contributed to improve institutional effectiveness and development results and what are challenges and opportunities for further improvements.

Fumiko Nakai, IOE Senior Evaluation Officer, delivered a presentation on: engagement with indigenous peoples: lessons from evaluations on IFAD's experience in supporting agricultural and rural development at the session titled learning to action across international evaluation: food and agriculture. The presentation focused on lessons and good practices based on a synthesis of past evaluations on projects and programmes involving indigenous peoples.

Evaluation is dependent on learning from each other and putting theory into action. The conference explored four ways that our community can learn from evaluation to create better practices and outcomes: (i) Learning to enhance evaluation practices; (ii) Learning what works and why; (iii) Learning from others; and (iv) Learning about evaluation users and uses.

The conference brought together evaluators, evaluation scholars, students, and evaluation users from around the world.