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Evaluating Country Programmes
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Box 2.5. Recommendations for good practices
in country programme evaluation (cont.)
– The widest possible stakeholder consultation and involvement is required in
CPEs. In addition to informal interviews, consideration should be given to using
customer surveys, focus group discussions and/or field-based participatory
methods.
– Reporting and follow-up procedures should be specified in advance. Normally,
CPEs will be discussed either by senior management, by the governing body of
an institution, or by the donor Parliament. There is a strong case for circulating
them to other country programmes run by the donor. If they can also be made
available to the taxpaying public, other donors (particularly in the same country,
but also at DAC/donor headquarters level) and implementing partners such as
NGOs, this is to be desired.
performance). Few of the CPEs that we reviewed paid much attention to these
contextual issues, when systemic issues in particular may have an important role to
play in explaining the effectiveness of aid at the country level.
The fourth key point for discussion is the issue of how to use CPEs constructively
for policy formulation. Many CPEs also made explicit how they would be disseminated
(to the Board of the agency, to the partner government, to the donor
Parliament or to the general public). Several donors were committed to share the
results publicly wherever possible. Once again, “best practice” depends in large
part on the nature of the donor, the partner government and the country
programme.
The key questions for donors thus concern the amount of money and time they
should spend on a CPE under given circumstances. These decisions should be
guided by a consideration of the inherent evaluability of the country programme in
question, realistic expectation of how the CPE findings will relate to practice. A
short and simple sketch may be the most appropriate approach when a) the nature
of the instruments or channels of aid make it hard to attribute or measure impact;
b) weak monitoring systems and poorly organised country programme documentation
provide a weak information base; or c) when other considerations (the realpolitik
of non-aid donor motivations or a partner government which lacks the will to review
and adapt the terms of aid and development policy) mean that recommendations
for significant change are unlikely to be implemented. A more ambitious research
effort may be justified when aid activities are amenable to evaluation, when there
are enough resources (existing information, time, money and skills) available for
OECD 1999