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Evaluating Country Programmes
112
The country programme evaluation of Egypt
Country programme evaluations: some general characteristics
The Policy and Operations Evaluation Department (IOB) embarked upon a first
series of country programme evaluations in 1991. This series dealt with the bilateral
development assistance programmes with India, Mali and Tanzania. The respective
reports, together with a fourth report containing the main findings and summaries
of the three country cases, and a synthesis of common issues on aid management
were submitted by the Minister for Development Co-operation to Parliament in
mid-1994. In 1995, IOB started a second series of country programme evaluations
including the aid programmes for Bangladesh, Bolivia and Egypt.
The objective of both sets of studies was to assess the policy relevance, effectiveness,
efficiency and sustainability of the results of the bilateral aid programme
with the respective countries. All CPEs covered the full period of the bilateral
development co-operation, i.e. a period of about twenty years. The studies had an
identical approach and organisation. The evaluation started with an inventory of all
activities (projects, programme aid, etc.) financed under the programme; subsequently
the various activities were clustered into sectors. A number of sectors were
selected for detailed evaluation, including field studies. Separate analyses were
made of commodity import support, debt relief and other forms of macro-economic
support. These studies and the evaluations of project aid in the selected sectors were
carried out by teams of independent researchers and consultants involving expatriate
and local evaluators. Each country programme evaluation was co-ordinated by an
IOB staff member and one external adviser, who together were responsible for writing
the final report.
The second set of CPEs differed from the first in several respects. Following the
further integration of development co-operation into foreign policy, the aid effort
was placed in the context of the overall bilateral relations between the Netherlands
and the recipient country. Moreover, greater attention was paid to two priority
themes of the Netherlands’ development assistance: environment and the role of
women in development, and the dynamics of the programme during the period
under review. Furthermore, all three CPEs included perception studies to assess
how Dutch aid was perceived by the local communities.
Finally, the recipient countries were more closely involved in the evaluation
process. This involvement took different forms in the three countries; the main difference
being that there were advisory groups in the recipient countries for the
Bolivian and Egyptian CPEs, whereas feedback in Bangladesh was organised
through sectoral and programme-level seminars. For all three countries, an official
reaction was included in the final report. Conversely, aid management in a generic
sense was omitted as a specific theme since it received ample attention in the
previous series of CPEs, and recent changes in the organisation of the Ministry of
OECD 1999