Aid Transparency Assessment

(from Karin Christiansen,Publish What You Fund )

“I am proud to share with you Publish What You Fund’s Aid Transparency Assessment that we have been working on over the last year. This is the first global assessment of the transparency of 30 major donors across seven indicators from eight data sources. The indicators cover donors’ commitment to aid transparency, transparency to recipient governments, and transparency to civil society.

The assessment is available on the new Publish What You Fund website. Explore the data yourself and see how donors perform.

Our first major finding highlights the necessity of donors building an international standard. The lack of comparable data meant we could not do the type of bottom up assessment we wished. However, the indicators developed from the limited data available provide an interesting comparison of current levels of donor transparency. We are planning to carry on with this work on an annual basis.

We hope there will be with more comprehensive, comparable and timely data to draw on in the future and would very much appreciate feedback, suggestions and thoughts on how to take this work forward.

The Assessment will be presented at the OECD DAC workshop on transparent development co-operation today, at the International Anti-Corruption Conference in Bangkok in November and at workshops in Washington in December.”

Seminar: Complexity-oriented Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PME): from alternative to mainstream?

Date: Wednesday 10 November 2010, 13.30-17.00 pm,
Venue: Theatre Concordia, Hoge Zand 42, The Hague, The Netherlands

The HIVA Research Institute for Work and Society of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, PSO Capacity Building in Developing Countries, the Flemish Office for Development Cooperation and Technical Assistance (VVOB), and Vredeseilanden/VECO invite you to a seminar organised within the framework of the Development Policy Review Network (DPRN) to discuss how alternative PME approaches such as Outcome Mapping and Most Significant Change may complement the mainstream Logical Framework approach for complex development programmes. The aim is to come up with recommendations for PME policies, based on lessons learned from practical experience with various PME approaches in complex situations.

The seminar forms the closing part of the DPRN ‘Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation in complex social situations’ process, in which the four organisations have worked on various studies about these PME approaches. They analysed the different PME approaches in detail and carried out various case studies of PME approaches which featured as learning histories for various organisations. In addition, the organisers reviewed current PME policy frameworks in Belgium and the Netherlands and organised a public online discussion about the use of Logical Framework versus Outcome Mapping. The insights of these four projects will be shared and discussed at the seminar. For more details see the attached invitation or contact Jan van Ongevalle of HIVA at Jan.VanOngevalle@hiva.kuleuven.be (Jan.VanOngevalle@hiva.kuleuven.be). More information on the process can be found on the website http://pme.global-connections.nl/.

You can register by sending an email to aanmelding@pso.nl (aanmelding@pso.nl) before 1 November, mentioning ‘DPRN seminar 10 November’

AusAID-DFID-3ie call for Systematic Reviews

The Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) have just launched a joint call for proposals for systematic reviews to strengthen the international community’s capacity for evidence-based policy making. AusAID, DFID and 3ie have identified around 59 priority systematic review questions across several themes: education; health; social protection and social inclusion; governance, fragile states, conflict and disasters; environment; infrastructure and technology; agriculture and rural development; economic development; and aid delivery and effectiveness.

Systematic reviews examine the existing evidence on a particular intervention or program in low and middle income countries, drawing also on evidence from developed countries when pertinent. The studies should be carried out according to recognized international standards and guidelines. All studies will be subject to an external review process and for this purpose teams will be encouraged to register for peer review with a relevant systematic review coordinating body.

Applications have to be submitted using 3ie’s online application system. Deadline for submission of applications is 9am GMT on Monday, November 29, 2010.

For information on how to apply, guidance documents and the call for proposals, go to http://www.3ieimpact.org/systematicreviews/3ie-ausaid-dfid.php

Conference: Making the Invisible Visible: An Emerging Community of Practice in Indicators, Sustainability and Values

Date: December 16-18, 2010
Venue: University of Brighton, UK

The University of Brighton will be hosting a groundbreaking, EU funded, international conference on the theme of Making the Invisible Visible: An Emerging Community of Practice in Indicators, Sustainability and Values, bringing together the leading thinkers, practitioners and organizations in these fields.  The conference will also showcase a pioneering €1million EU funded project to trial values-based indicators at the project (see www.wevalue.org), which has demonstrated its value as a tool to measure in a non-reductionist, yet rigorous way, the values dimension of civil society activity, and offers a model of good practice in  civil society-university collaborations.

Among the speakers due to address the conference are global experts in economics, such as Augusto Lopez-Claros (former Chief Economist and Director of the the Global Competitveness Report at the World Economic Forum, and developer of the Humanitarian Response Index); leading environmentalists such as Arthur Dahl (President of the International Environment Forum, former Deputy Assistant Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and former coordinator of the UN System-Wide Earthwatch) and Professor Arjen Wals (UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development and world expert on environmental education); parliamentarians  such as Professor Bedrich Moldan (Senator in the Parliament of the Czech Republic and a global authority on indicators for sustainable development); civil society organizations as diverse as the International Red Cross, Earth Charter International, the Alliance for Religions and Conservation (ARC, among others; world experts on values in business across the world, such as Richard Barrett (leadership expert mapping values among some 2000 organizations and 3000 leaders in over 40 countries); and many more.

Attendance is free, and there are still possibilities to contribute with a presentation and/or a workshop on the connection between values, sustainability and the challenges of evaluation in your work.

To register at the conference please go to: http://www.brighton.ac.uk/sdecu/research/esdinds/conference/index.html

When is the rigorous impact evaluation of development projects a luxury, and when is it a necessity?

by Michael Clemens and Gabriel Demombynes, Centre for Global Development, 10/11/2010  Download (PDF, 733 KB)

“The authors study one high-profile case: the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained local economic development in rural Africa. They illustrate the benefits of rigorous impact evaluation in this setting by showing that estimates of the project’s effects depend heavily on the evaluation method.

Comparing trends at the MVP intervention sites in Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria to trends in the surrounding areas yields much more modest estimates of the project’s effects than the before-versus-after comparisons published thus far by the MVP. Neither approach constitutes a rigorous impact evaluation of the MVP, which is impossible to perform due to weaknesses in the evaluation design of the project’s initial phase. These weaknesses include the subjective choice of intervention sites, the subjective choice of comparison sites, the lack of baseline data on comparison sites, the small sample size, and the short time horizon. We describe how the next wave of the intervention could be designed to allow proper evaluation of the MVP’s impact at little additional cost.”

See responses to this paper here:

The Katine Challenge: How to analyse 540+ stories about a rural development project

The Guardian & Barclays funded and AMREF implemented, Katine Community Partnerships Project in Soroti District, Uganda is exceptional in some respects and all too common in others.

It is exceptional in the degree to which its progress has been very publicly monitored since it began in October 2007. Not only have all project documents been made publicly available via the dedicated Guardian Katine website, but resident and visiting journalists have posted more than 540 stories about the  people, the place and the project. These stories provide an invaluable in-depth and dynamic picture of what has been happening in Katine, unparalleled by anything else I have seen in any other development aid project.

On the flip side, the project is all too common in the kind of design and implementation problems that have been experienced, along with its fair share of unpredictable and very influential external events, including dramatic turn-arounds in various government policies. Plus the usual share of staffing and contracting problems.

Right now the project has completed its third year of operation and is now heading into the fourth and final year, one more year than originally planned.

I have a major concern. It is during this final year that there will be more knowledge about the project available than ever before, but at the same time its donors, and perhaps various staff within AMREF, will be becoming more interested in other new events appearing over the horizon. For example, the Guardian will cease its intensive journalistic coverage of the project from this month, and attention is now focusing on their new international development website

So, I would like to pose an important challenge to all the visitors to the Monitoring and Evaluation NEWS website, and the associated MandE NEWS email list:

How can the 540+ stories be put to good use? Is there some form of analysis that could be made of their contents, that would help AMREF, the Guardian, Barclays, the people of Katine, and all of us learn more from the Katine project?

In order to help I have uploaded an Excel file listing all the stories since December 2008, with working hypertext links. I will try to progressively extend this list back to the start of the project in late 2007. This list includes copies of all progress reports, review and planning documents that  AMREF has given the Guardian to be uploaded onto their website.

If you have any questions or comments please post them below, as Comments to this posting, in the first instance.

What would be useful in the first instance is ideas about plans or strategies for analysing the data. Then volunteers to actually implement one or more of these plans.

PS: My understanding is that the data is by definition already in the public domain, and therefore anyone could make use of it. However, that use should be fair and not for profit. What we should be searching for here are lessons or truths in some form that could be seen as having wider applicability, which are based on sound argument and good evidence, as much as is possible.

Do we need a Minimum Level of Failure (MLF)?

This is the title of a new posting on the Rick on the Road blog, the editorial arm of Monitoring and Evaluation NEWS. It argues that improving aid effectiveness by identifying and culling out the worst performers is a different and possibly more appropriate strategy than identifying and replicating the best performers. This argument ties directly into the debate about RCTs, which are considered by some as the best means for improving aid effectiveness.

PS 22 October: Kirstin Hinds of the DFID Evaluation Department has pointed out (in a reply to my original blog posting) that DFID has published a more recent independent review of project completion reports (covering 2005-2008) which may be of interest.

Other recent postings on the Rick on the Road blog include:

A full list of all editorial posts is available here.

The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development

“In this essay, Andrew Natsios describes what he sees as the most disruptive obstacles to development work in agencies such as USAID: layers and layers of bureaucracy. He gives a first-hand account of how this “counter-bureaucracy” disfigures USAID’s development practice and even compromises U.S. national security objectives. Most of all, he argues, the counter-bureaucracy’s emphasis on easy measurement is at odds with the fact that transformational programs are often the least measurable and involve elements of risk and uncertainty.

To overcome counter-bureaucracy barriers, Natsios suggests implementing a new measurement system, reducing the layers of oversight and regulation, and aligning programmatic goals with organizational incentives. Unless policymakers address the issue, he says, U.S. aid programs will be unable to implement serious development programs while complying with the demands of Washington.”

Revised 07-13-2010

See also “BEYOND SUCCESS STORIES: MONITORING & EVALUATION FOR FOREIGN ASSISTANCE RESULTS Posted on 8 June, 2009

The Big Push Back (and push forward)

“On the 22nd September, Rosalind Eyben organised a meeting of some seventy development practitioners and researchers worried about the current trend for funding organisations to support only those programmes designed to deliver easily measurable results, although these may not support transformative processes of positive and sustainable changes in people’s lives.

Following on from a major conference in May in the Netherlands about evaluative practices in relation to social transformation (http://evaluationrevisited.wordpress.com/), the meeting took
the first steps in strategizing collectively in support of these practices”  Attached is Rosalind’s brief report of the meeting.

PS: 11 October 2010. See the latest posting by Ros Eyben on this topic here, on the Hauser Centre blog

INTRAC workshop: Accountability without Impact?

Date: Date: 23 November 2010
Venue: Venue: St Anne’s College, Oxford, UK

There are many debates about the ‘So what?’ question, in terms of concerns about the actual impact of international cooperation. What is the development sector actually achieving in terms of improving the lives of the poor? Have we focused on proving accountability without truly pursuing ways to assess impact? What can we do about this?

This workshop will draw on practitioner experiences to assess the state of the current debate, asking where we are now; explore forward-thinking case studies; and facilitate productive discussion and debate about where we want to be, and how to move towards that. The workshop will be attended by senior INGO managers and policy makers, from Europe.

For further information click here http://www.intrac.org/pages/en/most-recent-event.html . Contact: zwilkinson@intrac.org

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