Evaluations Principles and Standards

Evaluation Standards

IEG's Phase 2 Report of the Bank’s involvement in global programs recommended, among other things, that IEG should include global programs in its standard evaluation and reporting processes to the Board. This includes:

Reviewing selected program-level evaluations conducted by Bank-supported global programs like IEG reviews other evaluations of Bank support at the project and country levels.
Working with the Bank’s global partners to develop consensus standards for the evaluation of global programs.

IEG is implementing both components of this recommendation concurrently, since they are complementary. Each is contributing to progress on the other.

Guidelines for Global and Regional Program Reviews

IEG has developed a set of guidelines for its own Global and Regional Program Reviews (GRPRs) in consultation with the Bank’s units involved with global programs, operations policy, and trust fund management. These guidelines – which presume the existence of a prior external evaluation commissioned by the governing body of the program being reviewed – draw upon the evaluation framework in IEG's Phase 2 Report, the three pilot GPRs which IEG completed in FY06 and the Sourcebook for Evaluating GRPPs.

Indicative Principles and Standards for Evaluating GRPPs

IEG made a presentation on this topic to the Fourth Meeting of the OECD/DAC Network on Development Evaluation in Paris on March 31, 2006. Attended by representatives from the evaluation units of 23 bilateral agencies and development cooperation ministries, and from the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and the International Monetary Fund, the meeting expressed broad support for developing principles and standards for evaluating GRPPs and requested that IEG play a leading role in doing so. The Sourcebook of Indicative Principles and Standards is the result of IEG's response to this request.

An earlier draft of the Sourcebook was reviewed at a Stakeholder Consultative Workshop held for this purpose in Paris on September 28-29, 2006. The workshop validated the approach of producing a free-standing and comprehensive document that presents, synthesizes, applies, and elaborates on existing evaluation principles and standards for the particular benefit of the governing bodies and management units of GRPPs. Workshop participants also provided comments that substantially improved the operational relevance of the Sourcebook and called for the additional preparation of a companion document of guidance notes and good-practice examples for the particular benefit of evaluators of GRPPs. The workshop was attended by 51 representatives (not including the workshop organizers) of the following stakeholder groups:

Bilateral donor agencies
UN organizations
MDBs
Foundations
Developing countries
NGOs/private sector
Global programs (management)
Global program evaluators
Evaluation associations

The present version of the Sourcebook, which incorporates the feedback received at the workshop, was presented to the Fifth Meeting of the DAC Evaluation Network in Paris on November 16-17, 2006. This meeting recommended a period of practical application, use, and review, rather than formal endorsement at this stage. It encourages the governing bodies and management units of GRPPs in which DAC members are involved to draw upon them in establishing their monitoring and evaluation policies and in conducting independent evaluations of their programs on a regular basis. It further encourages those who use this Sourcebook to provide feedback to IEG and the Network based on their experience, in order to inform and further improve the document for eventual formal endorsement by Network members.