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Evaluating Country Programmes
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Finally, country programmes and Country Programme Evaluations serve as
agency-wide, strategic planning tools as well as tools of programme management.
By viewing their work in the context of specific country situations, donors acquire a
deeper understanding of aid and development processes. As one example of this,
several donors have used CPEs to test progress made and obstacles encountered
in the adoption of cross-cutting themes (e.g. the mainstreaming of gender equity or
poverty reduction as agency-wide goals). Another example would be the use of
CPEs to examine “systemic” issues in aid performance: that is, to test the influence
of agency-wide management systems upon country-level performance. These
examples are discussed in more detail below.
Diversity in specific reasons for and uses of Country Programme Evaluations
If it is possible to identify a general rationale for evaluation at the country level,
the presentations at the Workshop demonstrated that the specific reasons for carrying
out a CPE vary. The specific rationale for any given CPE reflects a number of
factors: the nature of the donor organisation, the nature of the partner country, the
relationship between them (expressed in the nature of the country programme),
and the processes by which it is intended that the CPE will contribute to improved
aid performance (expressed, for example, in the relationship of the CPE to accountability
and learning).
The most obvious difference between donors is that between bilateral and
multilateral donors. Bilaterals must account to the Parliament and taxpaying public
in the donor country: reflecting this, the CPEs of bilaterals tend to require a greater
degree of disclosure.
However, there are other, more subtle differences between donor organisations
in terms of the rationale for Country Programme Evaluation. Amongst bilateral
donors, the larger organisations tend to have advanced further towards country programming
and thus to have a greater intrinsic motivation for a shift to Country
Programme Evaluation. Smaller bilateral donors (or those larger donors which still
operate in many countries through projects rather than country programmes) may
instead prefer to use CPEs to test only for relevance and efficiency, to contribute to
the creation of a country programme, or to test for the match between aid to a given
country and agency-wide policies (see below).
Differences in rationale can also be observed between the CPEs conducted by
a single donor organisation. Sometimes a donor will use different types of CPE for
different types of decision-making. The World Bank, for example, routinely uses two
types of CPE to meet different management needs: the longer Country Assistance
Reviews (CARs), which provide a lengthy and resource-intensive review of the
country context and Bank co-operation over a decade or more, and the shorter
Country Assistance Notes (CANs), which are internal documents focusing upon a
narrower range of issues and addressing only certain performance criteria.
OECD 1999