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Evaluating Country Programmes
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When preparing country evaluations, institutions should report on progress achieved in the
country on cross-cutting concerns of poverty reduction, gender equity, governance and the environment.
If projects are directly earmarked for these concerns, assessment can be made of their efficacy.
Poverty reduction
The issue of poverty reduction is raised in the country strategies of many MDBs
these days. The World Bank uses a wide range of instruments in the strategies to
support efforts to reduce poverty – efficient and broad-based economic growth,
access by the poor to health care and education, urban and rural development targeted
on the poor, access of the poor to credit, the development of infrastructure
in poor areas and policy dialogue. The World Bank recommends that each of its
CASs i) include a coherent diagnosis of poverty based on recent analysis,
ii) develop special indicators and benchmarks for evaluating poverty outcomes and
an information strategy to monitor results at both the project and country levels,
and iii) include a poverty strategy which involves a high degree of participation of
the poor and marginalised in its preparation. These efforts to build a poverty reduction
strategy into the CAS and include indicators and benchmarks should greatly
facilitate the evaluation of the Bank’s efforts in this area.
The World Bank’s CARs and CANs have provided little focus so far on the poverty
reduction agenda of the Bank. The Bolivia CAR reported that the Bank’s three
social fund projects in the country appear to have been regressive because they
provided the poorest provinces with far less resources than the less poor ones. The
Bangladesh CAR noted that while considerable progress has been made in improving
the general well-being of the population through reduced infant mortality,
increased life expectancy and increased caloric intake, large segments of the population
still live in very poor conditions. The Ecuador CAN examined the CAS objective
to alleviate poverty, noting that the condition of the poor deteriorated over the
period in question, that targeted loans represented only a small portion of the total
and that the borrower was unable or unwilling to invest in a meaningful social safety
net. Greater efforts are being made to include poverty reduction in recent studies
such as the Sri Lanka CAN.
Efforts to build poverty reduction objectives with accompanying targets, indicators
and benchmarks into country strategies would facilitate evaluation efforts in
this area. In situations where the strategy does not address poverty reduction
objectives, country assistance evaluations can still relate project success and other
progress (or lack of progress) in this area.
Gender equity
The issue of gender equity – differences in economic and social indicators –
income, wealth, education, nutrition and access to services and resources – is
OECD 1999