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Evaluating Country Programmes
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Most of these criteria are to be found in the BMZ guidelines for the country concepts,
i.e. they are nothing new. What is important, however, is that they should not
be understood as a list of points that are left to the discretion of those who prepare
a country concept; they must instead be grasped as essential elements of a strategy
that is required for any engagement in a priority area and must be conceived in
such a way as to ensure that the contribution made by German development cooperation
is structure-building and sustainable.
Preparing meaningful priority area strategies can go beyond the scope of the
country concepts which are normally very condensed documents. This is especially
true for priority areas that are highly complex (as regards the goals to be achieved,
the framework conditions or actors involved, the levels of intervention, or the mix
of instruments). As a consequence, the BMZ recently started to prepare priority
area strategies as separate papers that are attached to the country concepts; the
former are included in the country concepts themselves only in the form of summaries.
Preparing priority area strategy papers no doubt calls for additional effort, but
this can substantially facilitate the monitoring task of the BMZ’s regional divisions.
Once a country concept has been prepared for the first time, or an existing one
has been updated, the corresponding country programme (the existing project
portfolio) should be reviewed and, if necessary, adjusted. It is very rare that the
country concepts of/for the development co-operation with a partner country are
drawn up from scratch. Hence, the fact that priority areas must be selected and a
“future-oriented” strategy formulated for them does not mean that the development
co-operation already underway is abandoned in favour of an entirely new
start. However, it does imply scrutiny (in agreement with the partner) and, if need
be, adjustment of ongoing projects on the basis of the priority area strategies formulated
in the country concept. This is particularly true when, at the moment of
working out a new country concept, an incoherent assortment of individual projects
coexist which have to be transformed, step by step, into a coherent priority area
strategy. Here, it can prove necessary to reorient, or indeed terminate, individual
projects and to conceive new ones.
Country concepts and the monitoring and strategic controlling responsibility
of the BMZ
While the guidelines set out by the BMZ specify the management function of
the country concepts in different respects, by and large they do not spell out the
function of the country concept as an instrument of strategic control, even though
this function is an essential component of management, a sine qua non if the goals
formulated in a country concept for development co-operation with a partner country
are to be achieved. It is simply not enough to select priority areas, no matter how
well-grounded they may be, to formulate a strategy for them, and to gear a
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