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Evaluating Country Programmes
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– In many cases a donor will use CPEs as an input to an agency-wide review of its
goals, methods and achievements. Danida and more recently DFID have combined
country programme evaluation with an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness
of various aid instruments with regard to the global goal of poverty
reduction. (The result is more recognisably a CPE in the case of the Danida
reports.) The EU, similarly, has commissioned six short CPEs as “part of a general
evaluation of EU aid… [focusing on] policy formulation, policy dialogue
between the EC and individual ACP states, and aid implementation and
management” (EU/Zimbabwe 1998: Preamble). In some cases, the CPE may be
used to judge the value of country programming itself: one of the three objectives
of the Norwegian evaluation of co-operation with Nicaragua was “to
assess to what extent the [country] strategy has been conducive in giving
guidance and served as a management tool” (Norway/Nicaragua, 1998: 9).
The boundaries between these rationales are not clearly demarcated and most
CPEs are designed to evaluate more than one level of goals. There are some CPEs
which are designed primarily to provide input to an agency-level review of goals
and approaches but which may also be of value to the country programme manager.
Others are designed as documents related first and foremost to the country planning
and implementation cycle, but may nonetheless be drawn upon in headquarters
reviews of aid management and performance. The multiple rationales of most
CPEs are apparent from Table 2.2.
Nature of goals
Table 2.2. Nature or level of the goals evaluated in CPEs
Number of CPEs
Number %
Individual project goals 22 88
Country programme goals 25 100
Agency-wide goals 8 33
Source: Authors.
Relationship to learning and planning: historical and forward-looking CPEs
The second axis by which a CPE could be classified provides a continuum from
historical to forward-looking evaluations. Here, the rationale question is: “Is the
CPE intended primarily to identify and explain past performance, or to provide concrete
recommendations in order to improve future performance?” At one extreme
OECD 1999