Learning from evaluation must take place at country level - IOE
Rome, 31 May 2024 – “It is important to make sure that learning from evaluation efforts is taking place in the countries that we work in, and that we involve the voices of local people. The traditional model of ‘fly-in, get the data and feed it back to our institutions’ needs to change. We need to be much closer to the partners that we work with, ensure that learning is happening at the country level, and that the notion of accountability is also for the beneficiaries of the projects, not only for our donors”. Dr Sabine Bernabè, Vice President and Director-General of the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of the World Bank, explained the importance of embracing this approach during a briefing session with the staff of the Independent Office of Evaluation of IFAD (IOE), on 31 May 2024.
In her visit to IFAD headquarters, in Rome, Sabine was joined by Dugan Fraser, Program Manager of the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI). Sabine and Dugan made a presentation to IOE staff on the work of GEI to date, and delved into its plans for future collaboration. The valuable insights sparked an engaging exchange around the important opportunities that the growth and development of the GEI presents the international evaluation community. During their visit, Sabine and Dugan also met with Dr Gerardine Mukeshimana, Vice-President of IFAD.
GEI is an alliance of bilateral and multilateral development agencies, and centres for higher education and research. IOE is a significant contributor to the Initiative, which supports developing countries in strengthening their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems to help governments gather and use evidence that improves the lives of their citizens. IEG leads the Initiative, in collaboration with the Independent Evaluation Office of the United Nations Development Programme (IEO).
In his presentation, Dugan noted that GEI uses an integrated systems approach to enhance the institutional capacity of developing countries to conduct and learn from evaluations. Lessons learned through practice allow continuous refinement of the approach to provide effective country-specific solutions. In particular, GEI provides training, technical assistance and knowledge services to partner countries. Flagship programmes include the Centres for Learning on Evaluation and Results (CLEARs), the International Program for Development Evaluation Training (IPDET), the Better Evaluation platform, and the gLOCAL Evaluation Week.
GEI has achieved notable results over the past three years. These include having trained 15,000 people in M&E, strengthened 34 sub-national M&E systems, organized 1,147 M&E events that have been attended by 69,000 people, reached 1.2 million users via social media, and accrued over 2 million web page views.
Looking at the next five years, the Initiative is seeking to further enhance its offerings in a number of ways. Key priorities include achieving an even deeper engagement at country level for transformative impacts, selectively expanding its reach of regional partners to cover more countries, launching new and fully functional regional centres and partnerships, and increasing capacity development opportunities for a more diverse and inclusive cadre of M&E professionals.
Dr Indran A. Naidoo, IOE Director, was among the first the first to believe in the value of the GEI. In his previous role as Director of IEO, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Alison Evans, former World Bank Vice President and IEG Director General, in January 2020. This marked the first step towards establishing the global partnership to support evaluation capacity development.
For further information, please contact Dr Alexander Voccia [here]
RESOURCES
- To access the GEI Annual Report 2022-2023, please click here.
- For more information about GEI, please click here.
- To access the signing of the GEI MoU in January 2020, please click here.
IOE 20th ANNIVERSARY
- To access the brochure ‘More than a journey | 20 years of independence, please click here.
- To access Fabrizio Felloni’s interview on the evolution of independence of IOE, please click here.
- To access the latest edition of Independent Magazine, please click here.
- To learn why independent evaluation makes IFAD a more credible institution, please click here.
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