The Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE) was created in mid-1999 when the evaluation function in the Bank was redesigned after a thirty-year history. At that time OVE became independent of Bank Management, reporting solely and directly to the Board of Executive Directors. In this redesign, the Board mandated that OVE conduct Country Program Evaluations (CPE); policy, strategy, thematic and instrument evaluations; and oversee the Bank's internal monitoring and evaluation system, processes and instruments. Moreover, OVE conducts oversight reviews of corporate strategy, processes and instruments; provides normative guidance on evaluation issues; and contributes to evaluation capacity building in the region. In 2003, OVE began conducting ex-post project evaluations as well.

• Independence
• Disclosure Policy
• Guiding Principles
• Priority Areas of Work
• Policy and Instrument Evaluations
• Sector and Thematic Evaluations
• Ex-post Project Evaluations
• Oversight of Bank Systems and Processes
• Evaluation Capacity Development
• Participation in the Development Evaluation Community of Practice

Independence:

OVE is independent of Bank Management. It has organizational and behavioral independence, and is free from external pressure and conflicts of interest according to the criteria established by the Evaluation Cooperation Group of the Multilateral Development Banks (ECG), of which the IDB is a founding member. OVE's findings, analyses, and conclusions are free from influence by line management at all stages of the process, including the planning of work programs and budget, formulation of terms of reference, staffing of evaluation teams, execution of evaluations and approval of reports.

Disclosure Policy:

The Bank implemented an Access to Information Policy on January 1, 2011. The general principle is to make information available to the public unless it fits the exceptions mentioned in the policy. As a result, all OVE documents will be made available to the public after the Board of Executive Directors has completed its consideration of them. Restrictions apply, however. Only summaries are disclosed if the borrowing member country objects to disclosure of a Country Program Evaluation. In that case, information deemed confidential and sensitive will be redacted and a notation as to what section was redacted. In addition, written comments on evaluations submitted by the country concerned or by the Bank's Management, if any, will be made publicly available if the underlying evaluation is available.

Guiding Principles:

The Board of Governors and the Board of Executive Directors of the IDB seek to ensure that evaluation drives the Bank's decision-making processes and provides the means to measure the Bank's effectiveness so as to ensure accountability. They have stipulated that evaluation is "a tool for both institutional learning and for systematic assessment of the effectiveness of Bank development policies, the results of Bank financed activities, and related processes." [1] This dual function of evaluation, illuminating lessons to be learned and assessing accountability, is the foundation for the four critical principles that guide OVE's work:

• Evaluation is a tool, not an end in itself. Like other tools, it must constantly be scrutinized for improvement;
• Evaluation is focused on institutional learning. Lessons discovered from evaluation work become relevant only when the institution learns from the work and changes future behavior accordingly;
• Evaluation must focus on assessing the development effectiveness of Bank activities; and
• Evaluation must focus on the results of Bank-financed activities, not only outputs (projects approved, funds lent), but also the outcomes.

Priority Areas of Work:

Country Program Evaluations (CPE) review the recent historical experience of the Bank with an individual country in order to improve the planning and goal-setting capacity of the Bank, as well as to evaluate progress toward achieving country program objectives. CPE review the relevance and coherence of Bank strategy in the country, examine the results of Bank-funded operations, the efficiency of execution and provide feedback from the Borrower about the efficacy of Bank actions. Country Program Evaluations are tied to the electoral cycle in the country in question so as to provide an evaluative contribution to the Banks new Country Strategy when an administration changes. CPE are not designed as decision documents, but rather they provide the Board with an account of Bank-funded programs and create an opportunity for reflection and lesson learning to improve future programs.

These evaluations are complex and challenging because the attribution of results is difficult to ascribe at the country level where so many other actors and factors, including the Government itself, are involved, not to mention intervening variables such as external shocks and natural disasters. Complicating matters, CPE focus on a reasonably long historical period in which hundreds of Bank actions and operations have occurred. Moreover, CPE frequently involve attempts to evaluate program interventions that lack clear objectives, measurable indicators, and have few explicit milestones and targets by which to measure progress.

Policy and Instrument Evaluations:

The Bank has a broad range of operational and sectoral policies, many of which define the explicit nature of the instrument the Bank uses to pursue its mandate. Policies are explicit guidance for Bank action aimed at defining the space within which Bank actions are possible. Whereas strategies define approaches and priorities, policies define limits to action. Policies are always explicit and subject to approval by the Board. An important sub-set of policies is the one defining distinct instruments available to support development in the region. OVE evaluates these Bank policies and instruments on a periodic basis to determine their relevance and effectiveness. Policy evaluations may be ex-post or in-process evaluations of a sample of Bank projects relating to an explicit Bank policy. They address both the results of the projects and the value of the strategic approach being implemented by the Bank. Policy and instrument evaluations may also examine the Bank’s non-financial development activities as well as corporate issues.

Sector and Thematic Evaluations:

Like policy evaluations, sector and thematic evaluations are conducted on a sample of projects in a particular sector or relating to a specific theme of Bank lending where there is a high probability of learning lessons relevant for the design of future operations. The sample may include on-going as well as completed projects and the sector or thematic area may be covered by a formal Bank strategy. Ten sector and thematic evaluations conducted in 2002 and 2003 assessed Bank strategies, but concluded that formal strategies provided relatively weak guidance in Bank operations design. As a result, future work will focus on evaluation of the projects themselves rather than sector and thematic strategies.

Ex-post Project Evaluations:

Ex-post Project Evaluations: In 2003 the Board of Executive Directors approved OVE’s proposal to conduct Ex-post Performance and Sustainability Assessments (EPSA) of a sample of completed projects two to three years after final disbursement as well as in depth impact evaluations of a small number of projects. Ex-post project evaluations were the primary product of the evaluation office that preceded the creation of OVE in mid-1999, but these were not part of OVE’s new mandate, which was to concentrate on broader types of evaluation such as country program, strategy, sector and thematic evaluations.

Ex-post Performance and Sustainability Assessments (EPSA) are designed to evaluate project performance (results across different beneficiary groups, unintended effects, comparisons with alternative options) and assess sustainability two to three years after Bank support ends. EPSA are building blocks for the impact evaluations, but also a product in their own right. Both types of ex-post project evaluation are designed to inform decisions by the country’s government and the Bank on whether to expand, modify or eliminate project categories. For the Bank, in particular, the evaluation’s purpose is to generate data that will allow the Bank to evaluate the models underlying project design and to determine whether to replicate interventions of evaluated themes in other countries.

Oversight of Bank Systems and Processes:

OVE oversees the quality of all Bank program and project evaluation systems and makes recommends for improvements. In this context, OVE assesses the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of the Bank’s monitoring and evaluation system, its processes and instruments, and attests to the validity of Management’s findings. OVE also makes judgments about the “evaluability” of projects at entry, including the clarity of project goal definition, the relevance and strategic context of interventions, the construction of robust performance indicators at the outset, and the capacity to measure outputs associated with projects during the implementation, outcomes at project completion and actual project impacts. In a similar vein, OVE attests to the evaluability of Country Strategies. Finally, OVE conducts oversight reviews of the Bank’s corporate strategy, policies and processes.

Evaluation Capacity Development:

Part of OVE’s mandate includes Evaluation Capacity Development, which OVE does through cooperative evaluation agreements with sub-regional financial institutions, seminars and other training activities. The key evaluation capacity problem in borrowing member governments is the absence of an institutional location in the budget decision-making structure for evaluation. This has led OVE to provide limited direct evaluation capacity building assistance to Borrowers and to urge Management to address this problem in its modernization of the state projects. For its part, OVE also has included Borrower participation in ex-post project evaluations as a way of increasing their institutional capacity to conduct evaluations and use them for better resource allocation.

OVE has cooperative agreements with the Caribbean Development Bank, the Central American Bank for Economic Integration and the University of the West Indies to carry out joint evaluation capacity development activities. OVE also has worked with the Brazilian Institute for Research in Applied Economics (IPEA) to develop evaluation networks in Latin America and to increase awareness of the utility of evaluation for public administration. Finally, in conjunction with IPEA, the Bank supported the development of the website of Inter-American Roundtable on Evaluation and Performance Measurement, which contains relevant resources in Spanish and English.

Participation in the Development Evaluation Community of Practice:

The IDB is a founding member of the Evaluation Cooperation Group of the Multilateral Development Banks (ECG) and a participant in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Development Assistance Committee (OECD/DAC) Network on Development Evaluation (NODE). Both groups collaborate on the development of good practice standards for evaluation; harmonization of evaluation policies, procedures and practices to the extent possible given differing institutional circumstances; information exchange; evaluation capacity development and joint evaluations, where feasible.

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