As aid donors tighten their financial belts and focus on value for money, monitoring and evaluation is becoming an increasingly important and scrutinized stage in the development project life cycle, affecting project selection, spending modalities and strategic planning.
Structured, formal and transparent evaluation is often the best way for donors and beneficiaries to tell if a development project achieves its intended goals. While there are significant costs in both time and money, evaluation can also help donors learn from their successes and failures and improve future project execution.
For these reasons, the world’s largest multilateral development institutions, including the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the African Development Bank, have sanctioned and implemented independent evaluation departments with the mission to provide an objective assessment of their programs and overall operations and, according to the World Bank, “to identify and disseminate lessons learned from experience.”