Getting Evaluation Right: A Five Point Plan
Final (for now) evaluationtastic installment on Oxfam’s attempts to do public warts-and-all evaluations of randomly selected projects. This commentary comes from Dr Jyotsna Puri, Deputy Executive Director and Head of Evaluation of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie)
Oxfam’s emphasis on quality evaluations is a step in the right direction. Implementing agencies rarely make an impassioned plea for evidence and rigor in their evidence collection, and worse, they hardly ever publish negative evaluations. The internal wrangling and pressure to not publish these must have been so high:
- ‘What will our donors say? How will we justify poor results to our funders and contributors?’
- ‘It’s suicidal. Our competitors will flaunt these results and donors will flee.’
- ‘Why must we put these online and why ‘traffic light’ them? Why not just publish the reports, let people wade through them and take away their own messages?’
- ‘Our field managers will get upset, angry and discouraged when they read these.’
- ‘These field managers on the ground are our colleagues. We can’t criticize them publicly… where’s the team spirit?’
- ‘There are so many nuances on the ground. Detractors will mis-use these scores and ignore these ground realities.’
The zeitgeist may indeed be transparency, but few organizations are actually doing it.
Building partly on a previous 
The newly launched 
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Three DM2008 jurors who are past grant winners are sharing their well-learned lessons with the hundred finalists..jpg)
As the recently named Director of the Agriculture and Rural Development Department -- one of DM2008's funders --Juergen Voegele is leading a vigorous effort to re-energize and broaden the World Bank's commitment to agricultural development. During his peripatetic rounds of the competition, Voegele sat down for this mini-interview:
Rural Africa Water Development Project (RAWDP)