Much activity, but no system

Apart from education perhaps, no field of policy is evaluated as intensively as the one of development in Germany. That is what Reinhard Stockmann of Saarbrücken University concludes. At the same time, however, he notes a “high degree of segmentation and subdivision”. The data published by the various German agencies that receive BMZ funds can normally be neither compared nor aggregated.

Stockmann complains that evaluations often deal with isolated projects. Accordingly, the agency in question may learn for project-management purposes, but the conceptual and cross-institutional learning curves basically remain flat. As a remedy, Stockmann proposes to publish all evaluations. At present, only the BMZ itself does so. The professor from Saarbrücken stresses that maximum transparency would also serve methodo­logy. After all, authors who discuss their findings in public are under pressure to give plausible account of how they reached them.

Stockmann heads Saarbrücken University's Centre for Evaluation. Together with Axel Borrmann of HWWI (Hamburg Institute of International Economics), he was jointly responsible for the study commissioned by the BMZ. The scholars and their staff spent two years scrutinising the ministry’s evaluation practices as well as those of seven government agencies, six party-political foundations and six civil-society and church-based organisations.

The researchers see plenty of willingness to embrace change at the BMZ and it’s various implementing bodies. They praise the progress made in the past ten years. For example, all major agencies now have an evaluation department geared to the standards of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC). They also work more closely with independent evaluators.

However, the authors also complain that all organisations they examined spend too little money on evaluation. Estimating that the minimum outlay required is one percent of total expenditure, they report that none of the agencies reach that level.

The researchers are also critical of the quality of evaluations, which they claim varies from institution to institution. They praise “exemplary work” done by KfW Ent­wicklungsbank, GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) and Welthungerhilfe, a charity. In general, however, non-governmental organisations are found to be less willing to become transparent. The scholars recommend that the BMZ strengthen its own evaluation division both “financially and in terms of human resources”. They also believe it would make sense to establish an independent evaluation agency or an independent evaluation board to support “system creation”.

International interest in the evaluation of development efforts has grown in recent years. One major reason is the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which lists “management for results” and “mutual accountability” among its key principles. Meanwhile, promises to step up development assistance – for instance in the EU context or multilaterally at the Monterrey Summit in 2002 – have prompted questions in parliaments about what aid actually achieves.

The “Evaluation of the german development cooperation” has only been published in German by Waxmann-Verlag (Münster). The first volume, with the synopsis, will also be published in English by the end of the year. At the press conference marking the launch of the German edition in Berlin, Erich Stather, state secretary at BMZ, stressed the relevance of the study for “coherent development cooperation”. Its findings furnish cogent confirmation, he said, of the need for reform and change, a case BMZ has been making since the beginning of the current legislative period. Describing the study as fully in line with BMZ thinking, Stather pointed out that the task now is to translate the findings into tangible reforms with the development agencies.

Hans Dembowski