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Evaluating Country Programmes
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out separate evaluations, then this is obviously to be desired. To put it another way,
the potential cost savings on a joint evaluation may make it possible to do more
with a fixed research budget: the scope or depth of the evaluation can be improved,
or the frequency with which evaluations are held can be increased, both of which
would improve their ability to contribute to programme improvements. Certainly
the contextual analysis (the assessment of economic structure and prospects; analysis
of processes, indicators and incidence of poverty; evaluation of partner government
policy environment and capabilities; and description of the country-level aid
environment) could profitably be shared between two donors.
Secondly, there are methodological advantages to multi-donor evaluation.
This is obviously related to the previous point on cost savings, if it means that an
equal or superior analysis is obtained for less cost. As mentioned already, one of
the most important conceptual questions concerns the choice of yardstick against
which any given country programme should be evaluated. The logical choice in
most cases would be the country programme of a similarly sized and oriented
donor in the same country, yet the amount of information on another donor’s programme
which is available in the public domain may be very limited. Multi-donor
CPEs could, in theory, provide a way to achieve more detailed comparators.
Thirdly, donor co-operation in CPEs has considerable potential for spillover
effects, facilitating improved donor co-ordination in country programming (an area
in which official aid is generally in need of much improvement: a point made by
USAID with regard to Indonesia).
Multi-donor evaluations may in theory be attractive for the partner government.
Providing input to donor CPEs imposes an extra burden upon underresourced
partner governments. There are thus potential advantages for government
officials if they could answer the questions of two or more donors at once
rather than have to formulate replies to the same set of questions from several
donors in succession. Increasing partner country ownership of the evaluation can be
an important contribution to improving aid co-ordination and coherence.
Unfortunately, however, donors perceive various practical impediments to
joint evaluations. Donor country programmes usually have different timeframes. If
the CPE is intended to relate to a specific programme cycle, what is a good time to
conduct a CPE for one donor may not be a logical evaluation point for another.
Donors differ in their global institutional goals: if one donor wishes to evaluate its
country programme against the goal of poverty reduction and the other donor has
multiple goals then joint evaluation will be hard. The difficulties of evaluating different
aid instruments against common criteria, an issue for any single donor, may
be even more pronounced in joint evaluations. These problems are not insurmountable
and some (such as the issue of comparing different aid instruments) can
be seen as opportunities as well as constraints. These problems do, however, help
OECD 1999