Evaluating Country Programmes - OECD Online Bookshop

OECD 1999
Country Assistance Evaluation in the Multilateral Development Banks
Attempts should be made to reduce the costs of country evaluations by focusing on current and
relevant issues. It should be ensured that resources allocated for evaluation are commensurate with
the level of analysis and extent of coverage.
Country selection criteria
While, in principle, CAEs should be undertaken for all countries to which institutions
provide assistance, it is clear that certain strategies and programmes in
some countries warrant more attention than others do. Criteria to be used when
selecting which country to evaluate include:
– The size of the institution’s portfolio relative to the size of the country’s economy,
domestic and foreign investment levels, sector expenditures, etc.
– The number of institutional operations processed under the respective
strategies.
– Strategic goals, objectives and priorities of the programme.
– Challenges and risks inherent in the strategies.
– The country’s state of transition, and influence of other factors in its development.
– Whether it is obvious from the outset that valuable information and lessons
to be learned will derive from the evaluation.
Institutions need to be selective and judge carefully which country strategies and programmes
to evaluate. Institutions should select those countries and programmes where it is obvious that the
information and lessons learned from the evaluation will be beneficial to the country, institution and
development community.
Period of coverage
There have been many cases where an institution has already carried out a
number of strategies as well as a mix of programmes for a country. In some of these
cases, the strategy has deviated substantially from the previous one. However,
projects extend well into another strategy cycle and are often included in ensuing
strategy discussions. The period of coverage of the evaluation should be sufficiently
long so that projects and their evaluations can be completed. Institutions
need to include all of the strategies in their evaluation. In those cases where the
goal (s), objectives and priorities of respective strategies have substantially
changed, an assessment of individual strategies may be required. In other cases,
there may be only one relatively recent operational strategy for the country, even
though the institution has been providing assistance over a much longer period of
time. In these cases, it would be desirable to extend the period of time considered
to cover these earlier operations.
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