How to monitor and evaluate anti-corruption agencies: Guidelines for agencies, donors, and evaluators
This report provides technical, methodological, and practical guidance to assist staff of Anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) in undertaking monitoring and evaluation and shows how the outcomes and impact of the work of ACAs can be evaluated in an objective, evidence-based manner. Download Report from U4.
This paper (Bourguignon, Platteau / May 2012) addresses the issue of the impact of aid supply on aid effectiveness. We proceed in two steps. First, we review research works that deal with the problem of governance in donor-recipient relationships and are susceptible of highlighting effects of aggregate aid availability. Second, we provide a conceptual framework that explicitly incorporates a trade-off between considerations of needs and governance. We examine the impact of aid supply on the manner in which a donor agency allocates the available money between countries differing in terms of both needs and domestic governance. The central conclusion is that a donor’s utility function that embodies the need-governance trade-off and the associated optimization mechanism yield a meaningful rule to guide inter-country allocation of aid resources.
IDEAS International Development Evaluation Association
From IDEAS Administrator
PostNet Suite #84, Private Bag X12, Cresta
Johannesburg 2118, South Africa
E-Mail: admin@ideas-int.org <mailto:admin@ideas-int.org>
A 4-part series of webinars on Monitoring & Evaluation is open to the public, every Thursday in July, starting July 5^th . The sessions are free but registration is required.
The webinars are cosponsored by Catholic Relief Services, American Red Cross/Red Crescent, United States Agency for International Development, and AEA’s International and Cross Cultural TIG
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Monitoring & Evaluation Planning for Projects/Programs – Scott Chaplowe*
*Scheduled:* Thursday, July 5, 2012, 2:00 – 2:20 PM EDT
*Description:*This webinar is part of a four-part series on monitoring and evaluation. In this Coffee Break, Scott Chaplowe will provide concise guidance to develop and implement an M&E system for project planning, implementation, and evaluation. The webinar covers the key components of a M&E system that trace a logical train of thought from the project’s theory of change to the specific objectives needed for these changes, methods for measuring change, and protocols for collecting and analyzing data and information.
*Register:*Open to the public. Preregister at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/244654536
American Evaluation Association: www.eval.org <http://www.eval.org/>
*Evaluation Jitters Part One: Planning for an Evaluation – Alice Willard*
*Scheduled:* Thursday, July 12, 2012, 2:00 – 2:20 PM EDT
*Description:*This webinar is part of a four-part series on monitoring and evaluation.One of the challenges with evaluations is that staff often think the work to prepare for an evaluation is completed with the basic scope of work. As a result, evaluators often arrive to conduct an evaluation and find that some basic data organization and prep work have not been done, adding stress, misunderstandings, and cost to the evaluation. This Coffee Break will introduce The Pre-Evaluation Guide, which provides several easy steps to help prepare for an evaluation, from basic document management through logistics organization.
*Register:*Open to the public. Preregister at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/773488608 <https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/773488608%20>
American Evaluation Association: www.eval.org <http://www.eval.org/>
*SMILER: Simple Measurement of Indicators & Learning for Evidence-based Reporting – Guy Sharrock & Susan Hahn*
*Scheduled:* Thursday, July 19, 2012, 2:00 – 2:20 PM EDT
*Description:*This webinar is part of a four-part series on monitoring and evaluation. To be successful projects must lean towards an adaptive management style and all staff must have a clear understanding of the project monitoring system and their role in its implementation. Yet few manuals exist on the nitty-gritty task of how to set up a monitoring system. CRS has created an approach to setting up a project monitoring system – SMILER – that includes mechanisms to turn data into useful knowledge that informs project learning and decision making whilst maintaining a focus on achieving results and reporting accomplishments. By emphasizing project monitoring, SMILER seeks to balance the need for project staff to seek and listen with the more formal obligations of evaluation to quantify and prove. The presentation will introduce SMILER and some useful tips of turning M&E rhetoric into practical reality.
*Register:*Open to the public. Preregister at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/797218760
American Evaluation Association: www.eval.org <http://www.eval.org/>
*Evaluation Jitters Part Two: Managing an Evaluation – Alice Willard*
*Scheduled:* Thursday, July 26, 2012, 2:00 – 2:20 PM EDT
*Description:*This webinar is part of a four-part series on monitoring and evaluation. Once an evaluation begins, the evaluation team needs a key organizational contact. This contact is often a junior staff person assigned to ‘manage’ the evaluation process. Rather than a technical or a senior manager, this contact’s job can include helping smooth logistics (setting up meetings), providing routine communication to the organization’s management about the progress of the evaluation, and also serving as the ‘go to’ for challenges and opportunities that come up during an evaluation. This webinar will introduce The Managing an Evaluation Guide, which provides several tips on how to schedule and organize the evaluation team.
*Register:*Open to the public. Preregister at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/751789457
American Evaluation Association: www.eval.org <http://www.eval.org/>
The M&E dashboard builds on previous ODI work on M&E of policy influence to provide an overview of how research communications work for the organisation, and its programmes and project teams.
Through the site at http://www.devinfo.org, visitors can download the DevInfo Initiative Response to Busan document, explore ways DevInfo technologies contribute to specific Busan objectives, and download details on DevInfo technology for aid coordination. The site also invites aid effectiveness specialists, private sector development partners, policy and decision makers, M&E specialists, and other development partners to engage with the DevInfo Support Group for customized innovations.
DevInfo is a database system endorsed by the United Nations Development Group for monitoring human development. It is a tool for organizing, storing and presenting data in a uniform way to facilitate data sharing at the country level across government departments, UN agencies and development partners.
How to monitor and evaluate anti-corruption agencies: Guidelines for agencies, donors, and evaluators
This report provides technical, methodological, and practical guidance to assist staff of Anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) in undertaking monitoring and evaluation and shows how the outcomes and impact of the work of ACAs can be evaluated in an objective, evidence-based manner. Download Report from U4.
Conferences · Events · INTRAC.
Monitoring and evaluation conference: new developments and challenges
Organisation: INTRAC, PSO & PRIA
Start date: 14 June 2011
14-16 June 2011, The Netherlands
This international conference will examine key elements and challenges confronting the evaluation of international development, including its funding, practice and future.
The main themes of the conference will include: governance and accountability; impact; M&E in complex contexts of social change; the M&E of advocacy; M&E of capacity building; programme evaluation in an era of results-based management; M&E of humanitarian programmes; the design of M&E systems; evaluating networks, including community driven networks; changing theories of change and how this relates to M&E methods and approaches.
Increased discussion on the merits and methods of Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) has emerged as a result of various trends in academic and practical fields of development thought and policy. In Latin America, as elsewhere, the inclusion of primary stakeholders in monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities is being insisted upon by donors, and increasingly sought by Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs). But concerns over costs, timing and quality as well as use of information thus gathered are also raised.
PM&E is often still considered to be mostly an issue of method and timing, as well as of information management and effective systems, but with the addition of involving beneficiaries in a consultative process. Furthermore PM&E is mostly considered to be relevant only as an activity at a particular stage of the project cycle (e.g. mid-term evaluation, local population as monitoring agents, or evaluation at the end of project or policy cycle); less commitment and experience can be observed at the point of making effective and transparent the adaptations in planning, implementation and institutional behaviour that can result from a process of PM&E. The phase of taking PM&E beyond the realm of methodology, into that of organisational change and institutional learning for a transformative development and research agenda is only slowly being initiated.
Donors using Performance Based Allocation (PBA) systems face two difficult issues: how to strengthen incentives to produce and document development results, and how to increase flexibility for fragile states. This paper suggests: 1) implementing short feedback loops to incentivise more attention to results and to monitoring and evaluation; and 2) establishing an additional performance-based fund to allow successful projects to be scaled-up. It proposes a venture-capital model of aid in fragile states – which aims to scale-up successes while accepting that not all projects will be successful. Donors supporting fragile states need to ask not “How much should be allocated?” but “Where can we really add value?”
There is increasing concern that development funds must produce demonstrable results in all countries. However, while needs within fragile states are the greatest, the success rate of projects achieving their goals tends to be lower in such challenging environments. Fragile states therefore achieve poor ratings in the Performance Based Allocation (PBA) system used by International Development Association (IDA) donors (and others). Simply allocating more money to fragile states, however, may risk damaging overall aid effectiveness.
via GSDRC: display.
