The trajectory of evaluation at AFD is a sure sign of how the evaluation of official development assistance (ODA) has gradually gained importance over the past forty years. Whilst the evaluation culture is now more embedded in practices, appropriating and disseminating it still presents a challenge and a priority in the current institutional context, where the demand for the evaluation of public policy has grown, echoing the increasing challenges for accountability to the general public. The momentum has been launched and is clearly visible in the regular demands from AFD’s Board of Directors, the highlights pointed up by the evaluation of AFD’s evaluation policy, and the adoption of the new programming Act on inclusive development and combating global inequalities – one of its major thrusts being the drive for more transparency and better monitoring of results on the ground.
To implement projects tailored to our partners’ contexts and issues and to continue learning from our successes and failures, our evaluation practice increasingly calls on a close dialogue with all of the stakeholders involved in the project cycle.
And we are also working with them to encourage their take-up of an evaluation culture.
These stakeholders include our partners, particularly in the global South, who being involved collectively take part in implementing our actions. They also include the beneficiaries, who are invited to take part in the evaluations so that their critical views on a project’s progress and the results achieved can be gathered and taken into account. And, finally they include AFD’s operational staff who are systematically integrated in the evaluation to enable improvements to our future operations. By setting them at the heart of this second biennial evaluation report, we wanted to show not only the key role they play in producing the evaluations, but also make their voices heard. Together, they contribute to the utility of these evaluations with the objective of helping decision-making to respond in a coherent and concerted manner to the needs of the communities that we support.