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16. Following a review of feedback from
the aforementioned user survey and of OE’s aspirations for the future,
a Vision Statement has been drawn up supported by a set of values (see
Box 4).
Box 4
OE Vision
OE wishes to promote a learning porcess that deepens its understanding
of the cause of and solutions to rural poverty through enhanced
cooperation with the Fund's partners.
With its partners, OE wishes
to use that knowledge to develop supportive instruments for
the rural poor to empower themselves.
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17. The Mission Statement (Box 5) describes
OE’s changing relationship with the partnership it serves. Together
with PMD, governments, implementing organizations, CBOs and other stakeholders,
OE seeks to generate knowledge and find solutions to improving the Fund’s
strategies, policies, projects, practices and procedures and to strengthen
the capabilities of its partners.
Box 5
OE Mission
With its partners and through
evaluation work, OE generates good practices, lessons learned
and strategic directions that can improve the performance of
policies, programmes and projects.
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It
also strives to draw lessons from previous experience so as to obtain
a greater understanding of the causes of and solutions to rural poverty,
and consequently recommends strategic directions for the Fund’s interventions.
The immediate aim is to improve the design and implementation of IFAD
projects, programmes and policies as well as to assist and empower CBOs
to become effective and sustainable agents in the alleviation of rural
poverty.
Box 6
Basic
Concepts
Vision
statements are designed to motivate the team. They tend to be
inspirational and about the team’s aspirations for the
future. A vision is based on a set of values that
drive it and give it meaning.
While a mission
is derived from the vision and values, it is operational
in nature. It provides a clear description of how OE will serve
its clients’ interests with high-quality and responsive
interventions. For this reason, a mission statement must
be grounded in a clear definition of the client or partnership
and of the kinds of products or services the team will deliver.
Finally, strategy
is a practical interpretation of the mission. The term
Strategic Objectives has been used to define this and the term
Strategic Directions to describe how they will be operationalized.
In these times of
rapid change and organizational growth, strategy is not a fixed
plan but rather an evolving one. For OE’s purposes, strategy
is a discovery process and certainly not a one-time
event. It states how the team will focus its resources (people,
time and money) on specific interventions that are strategic
to the interests of its clients. This set of agreements provides
the basis for developing annual work programmes.
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5. Defining OE’s Strategic
Objectives
18. OE established a framework of strategic
objectives (see Box 7) for the purpose of setting a course of strategic
interventions for the coming year. Again, these objectives were based
on OE’s new Vision and Mission Statements, as well as on an analysis
of many partners’ needs and the concerns expressed during the July 1999
survey.
Box 7
OE's Strategic Objectives
- Evaluation work should be issues-oriented
and respond to the needs of its partners
- OE's work must offer opportunities
for learning and knowledge generation together with its partners.
- Evaluation work should produce
learning effects and recommendations that are agreed to and
adopted by OE's parnters and lead to imporved IFAD operations,
policies and strategies that can be replicated.
19. The aim of OE is to undertake evaluations
that provide opportunities for improved performance (projects, programmes
and policies); respond to the needs of its partners and are thus issues-oriented;
offer opportunities for learning and knowledge generation together
with its partners; produce learning effects and recommendations for use
by partners; and create opportunities for replication and the dissemination
of knowledge to other stakeholders in the development community.
6. Four Main Features of
OE’s New Approach to Evaluation
Box
8
Four Main Features
- A strong service and partnership
orientation
- Evaluation work is working together
- Moving evaluation to a higher
plane
- Evaluation work needs to be
evaluated
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20. This approach to evaluation represents
a new mindset: OE’s partners and their needs now take centre stage.
OE wishes to be of service by providing practical solutions for use by
partners in improving their operations and policies. OE’s evaluations
must create value for its partners and its work must meet their expectations
and needs.
21. Other distinctive features of the strategic
objectives are OE’s understanding that evaluation work is inseparable
from learning, and its resolve to learn with its partners and develop
together with them the recommendations and lessons learned to help improve
the performance of IFAD’s operations. As OE learns and shares learning
in a cooperative relationship with its partners, it can increase the
likelihood of their adopting and using its products and services.
22. Although project evaluations are indeed
important, they are not the most cost-effective instrument at OE’s
disposal. Through thematic evaluations/studies and country programme evaluations
(CPEs), it is possible to have a multiplier effect and impact on several
projects, programmes and policies and to contribute in a systematic way
to the generation of the knowledge that IFAD and its operational divisions
require. It is for this reason that, in future, OE intends to reduce its
involvement in project evaluations and to move on to a higher plane.
 23.
Another key feature of OE’s new strategy is recognition of the need
to evaluate the validity of its work on a continuous basis. In the past,
OE has not assessed the rate of adoption of its recommendations and of
lessons learned. Has it indeed been successful? Did it contribute to any
kind of impact? OE has recognized that it needs to establish criteria
for evaluating the validity of its evaluation work. These criteria are
the rate of adoption and use by partners of its evaluation work and the
impact of such use in terms of improved performance of IFAD’s operations
and policies (see Box 9).
24. It is to be noted, however, that OE’s
accountability normally stops at the dissemination of recommendations
and lessons learned. In other words, their adoption and use is the responsibility
of the partners. Therefore, OE should take a more proactive approach to
working with its partners so as to reduce any uncertainty between the
validity of such interventions and the use to which they are put. OE’s
products and services are designed to respond to the strategic requirements
and priorities of its partnership. It can also use collaborative and engaging
processes in order to build in ownership of the recommendations. That
is, rather than leaving adoption and use to the readers of its reports,
OE could conceive the evaluation process in such a way that its outcomes
would be in the form of an agreement/understanding among the partners
to act on the recommendations and the lessons identified by the evaluation.
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