2012 was a successful year for us. As the focus on results, transparency and value for money has percolated through the wider development community, so demand for our core services in monitoring and evaluation has increased.
We initiated or completed over thirty evaluations in 2012, including the impact evaluations of the Millennium Village Programme in Ghana, the Joint Evaluation of Donor Support to Civil Society Engagement in policy Dialogue; an evaluation of Irish Aid’s country strategy in Ethiopia; evaluations of budget support in Tanzania for the EC and the mid-term review of DFID’s Climate and Development Knowledge Network. Our evaluation portfolio continues to grow into 2013, with significant work coming through the eight evaluation frameworks in which we are involved.
We also enjoyed the rare privilege of being invited to re-examine one of our most prominent evaluations – the Independent External Evaluation of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), conducted in 2003. While the evaluation report was supported by the IFAD Executive Board and President, at the time the general reaction was one of shock and surprise at the perceived severity of its conclusions including concern about the future of IFAD. As a result implementation of the IEE recommendations was slow at first but the recommended changes were pushed through in the 2007-10 Strategic Framework and IFAD was seen as a reforming organisation, capable of managing change and worthy of support. As a consequence the IEE is seen as a successful case of a comprehensive institutional evaluation.
In other areas, we continue to work on a range of governance programmes, including DFID’s State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI) and the State Partnership for Accountability, Responsiveness and Capability (SPARC) in Nigeria, and the Strengthening Accountability and Responsiveness (STAR) programme in Ghana. We also continued to contribute new thinking and critical insights into on-going Value for Money (VFM) debates. This year we designed a new diagnostic tool for DFID Nigeria to better monitor and measure VFM in governance and conflict programmes, assessed the VFM of Vaccine Product Development Partnerships for the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) and helped to improve the monitoring of climate change results and VFM for DFID in Tanzania.
We were awarded new contracts with over 35 different clients in 2012. We are working with GRM on two new DFID programmes in Nigeria: Voices for Change (V4C) and Mobilising for MDGs Programme (M4M), providing the Results Director and leading on monitoring and evaluation (M&E) on both programmes. Other new projects in 2012 included M&E and capacity building support to TradeMark East Africa and its partners in Rwanda; M&E support to NICE International (the UK’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence) on its health partnerships scheme in China and India; as well as GiZ-funded M&E training for staff in the new Government Evaluation Facility in Uganda. We’ve also developed an M&E handbook for the suite of DFID/World Bank market development programmes in Nigeria.
If would like to hear more about our current projects then please contact us on +44(0)1273 765250.
