Evaluating Country Programmes - OECD Online Bookshop

OECD 1999
Country Programme Planning and Country Programme Evaluation within SDC
participants felt that the recommendations of external evaluations were taken less
into account in the country programmes than the results of the self-evaluation processes.
Three reasons were given:
– The external evaluations did not acquire a sufficiently deep understanding
of the programme, got stuck on detail, and/or the recommendations were too
general.
– The ownership by the persons concerned was missing.
– And the policy framework for country programme was already determined.
In general, short self-evaluation processes accompanied by external facilitators
were considered as most efficient and effective. The recommendations of selfevaluations
were thought to be optimal inputs in planning exercises with a high
degree of SDC ownership. A proposal for a possible linkage of self-evaluation processes
with external evaluations was to evaluate first externally the different sectors
of a country programme and then to use these evaluations as inputs for a selfevaluation
workshop.
In general, it is the co-ordination office which leads the evaluations. Only the
final stages of the process may be more strongly determined by headquarters. It
is different for the programmes in Eastern Europe where the desk officers are
closely involved due to the recent opening of co-ordination offices in the Eastern
European partner countries. In Madagascar, where a phasing-out was decided,
there was a division of labour: the evaluation of parts of the programme was under
the responsibility of the co-ordination office, while the foundations for the decision
were outlined in a paper elaborated in co-operation with headquarters. The
distribution of the roles is not only related to the kind of decisions to be taken,
but is also a flexible arrangement considering the different degrees of operational/conceptual
experience found at the two ends of the country programme
(Desk Officer – Co-ordination Office). Depending on the Geographical Division,
the processes take place in an inductive or deductive manner. 8
The following tendencies can be observed in SDC:
– The West Africa Division is a good example of a creative bottom-up approach
for needs assessment, formulation of demands by the partners, and their
integration into the country programme. 9
– On the other side of the spectrum, the Latin America Division goes in the
direction of a highly structured deductive approach since it has developed a
whole system of inter-linked management instruments. 10
– The two Asia Divisions as well as the East Africa Division can be characterised
between these two accentuated approaches. The Asia I Division was actually
the pioneer in the standardisation of the country programme process. Now it
works on simplifying the processes and introducing a strongly value-oriented
approach.
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