Evaluating Country Programmes - OECD Online Bookshop

OECD 1999
Country Programme Evaluation: A State of the Art Review
the country’s needs? Does our aid work better in some sectors than others?
Are some of our aid instruments (programme aid, project aid, technical assistance)
performing better than others? What are the relative strengths and
weaknesses of different disbursement modalities (government to government,
NGOs, private sector partnerships, etc.)? Is our programme consistent
with our own comparative advantage?
ii) To explain the performance of the programme as a whole. Why is a certain pattern
of performance observed? Are there factors in the recipient policy environment?
Are there issues to do with the policy, structure or procedures of
the donor agency? In some studies (e.g. EU/Ethiopia), these are identified as
the “systemic issues” tackled in CPEs. Again, they receive different degrees
of attention indifferent studies. Most studies address the recipient policy
environment, some (e.g. UNDP/Myanmar) look at recipient procedures for
handling aid, some tackle explicitly the administrative performance of the
donor agency (e.g. Netherlands/India). Both Danida and DFID produced
CPEs which examined the poverty reduction impact of different forms of
interventions in selected partner countries.
iii) To make recommendations for ways in which to improve future performance.
Again, this varies from one study to another. Some CPEs make detailed recommendations
regarding future programme content and management; others
do not.
Taking these ideas further, the rationale for a CPE can broadly be classified by
locating it along two axes.
Goals used to evaluate performance in a CPE
The first axis differentiates between CPEs on the basis of the nature of the
goals to which the CPE is to refer. The question here is: “what level of goals (project,
country programme or agency-wide) are being used as the basis for evaluation?”
Three levels of goal-testing can be identified.
– At its simplest, a CPE may simply be an audit of all the various elements of
donor aid to a given partner country. In this case, the country programme is
treated as no more than the collection of projects, technical assistance and
programme aid flows to that country: the performance of each component is
compared to the component-specific goals.
– More usually, while the CPE may start with such a component-by-component
approach, there is an effort to evaluate the net contribution of these various
components to the country-level goals set out in the country assistance strategy
(known variously as a country programme paper, country co-operation
framework, etc.).
63