- Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón led the inauguration of the new CLEAR Center for Latin America, which is based at the Center for Research and Learning in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico.
- The Regional Center will specialize in supporting the creation of national monitoring and evaluation systems for public policies
- The Director of the IDB’s Office of Evaluation and Oversight emphasized CIDE’s significant role in the consolidation of the evaluation of policies in Mexico.
The new Regional Center for Learning in Evaluation and Results (CLEAR) for Latin America opened on June 11 in Mexico with the participation of the Mexican government and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
The inauguration took place at Los Pinos Presidential Palace and was attended by President Felipe Calderón; José Antonio Meade, Secretary of Finance and Public Credit; Edna Jaime, Representative of México EvalúaResearch Center; Cheryl Gray, Director of the IDB’s Office of Evaluation and Oversight and council representative of the CLEAR Initiative, as well as representatives of CIDE, CONEVAL, the Ministry of Public Service, the Federal Senior Audit, regional ambassadors and officials of international organizations.
The new Regional Center, based at CIDE, will specialize in supporting the creation of national monitoring and evaluation systems in Latin American countries to better measure the effectiveness and outcomes of public policies. At the inauguration, President Calderón stated that CIDE had been selected in a highly competitive process from 22 academic institutions throughout Latin America.
President Calderón also mentioned that the new CLEAR Center will receive $1.5 million from the Mexican government over the next three years, in addition to contributions from the IDB and World Bank, to support the consolidation of this learning center in monitoring and evaluation and managing for results.
The Secretary of Finance and Public Credit, José Antonio Meade, emphasized that the CLEAR Center represents “an excellent opportunity to help transform the public administration” in Latin American countries, especially in Mexico.
Furthermore, Edna Jaime, representative of the México Evalúa research center, stressed that the arrival of the CLEAR Center to the region will provide resources and the necessary mechanisms to advance the pending agenda on a solid foundation, and that the new CLEAR Center “will be a convergence space, a meeting point to develop and share knowledge, best practices and facilitate learning.”
Cheryl Gray, the Director of the IDB’s Office of Evaluation and Oversight, took part in the celebration and expressed she was convinced that the new center “will continue and strengthen the excellent monitoring and evaluation work that CIDE has performed in Mexico. This work will be extended to other Latin American countries and will be a source of knowledge and inspiration for other CLEAR centers”, thus helping to achieve better results worldwide.
For full-text speeches, videos and more photos of the event, please visit the website of the Presidency of Mexico.