Looking ahead, what do you see as being the main opportunities for evaluation to further permeate an evidence-based learning culture across IFAD, and for this culture to trigger life-changing impacts for our stakeholders in the field? Donal Firstly, the world, IFAD and the context in which we operate are changing very fast. One of the key opportunities for evaluation is to be agile, quick, nimble, and to get the right balance of ‘quick and dirty’ versus ‘rigorous and time consuming’. It’s important that we shift the focus of evaluation towards the higher value products and services that can take into consideration and respond quite quickly to changes in IFAD, in the development context, and in the countries where we work. We must make sure that we feed lesson back quickly into the system. Second, I can’t emphasize enough the much stronger collaboration we now have between management and IOE. There is collaboration in defining the timing and structure of the product-mix, sharing data sources, and ensuring the relevance of the evaluation products. This does not compromise the independence of IOE. On the contrary, if we are going to look at the learning function much more, then we need to be able to discuss, debate, and work more closely. I’ve seen really, really strong progress in this area over the past year. Jyotsna We need to be aware that evaluation is really important for an individual institution, but it’s also a global good as well, very much like climate and health. The more high-evidence we can produce, the more we can help others to become better. We should underscore that there is a service that we are doing to humanity when we produce high quality, credible evaluations. In this context, I would like to see responses to the question “how much did something work?”. For decision making, what is really important is to understand trade-offs. A policy maker is not necessarily thinking “should I introduce cash transfers?”, but rather “should I introduce cash transfers at the cost of setting up a completely separate insurance mechanism?”. So, the overall impact that a cash transfer is making versus an insurance mechanism is the trade-off. To understand that, I need to know how much difference a cash transfer made, and how much difference should I expect an insurance programme to make in the overall resilience of a targeted population before I can start to make those decisions. If evaluation wants to stay relevant in this space, it needs to answer the “how much?” question far better because that’s what will help us to understand cost-effectiveness and trade-offs. Nigel IFAD will need to adapt its tools to its new decentralized structure. With more staff decentralized we need to make sure that we keep a bridge between the field and headquarters to ensure that the decision
“One of the key opportunities for evaluation is to get the right balance of ‘quick and dirty’ versus ‘rigorous and time consuming’.” - Donal Brown
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“We should un that there is a that we are do manity when duce high qua ble evaluation
