I. Background

On 13 September 2006 IFAD’s Executive Board approved a new format and approach for IFAD’s country programmes, with much more emphasis on results, accountability, and country ownership. The Board agreed on a new instrument to describe and manage IFAD country programmes to be entitled a Results Based Country Strategic Opportunities Programme (COSOP).

These guidelines have been prepared specifically to assist IFAD staff and consultants in the preparation and implementation of a Results Based COSOP.  They are derived primarily from the proposal elaborated in the approved EB document however three key changes have been introduced since Board approval:

• more emphasis is being placed on the COSOP baseline;
• there is more emphasis on quantification of COSOP targets in the Results Management Framework to show exactly what is going to be delivered over the 5 year COSOP period; and,
• more detail is being placed on the IFAD project pipeline during the COSOP period through inclusion of a new appendix entitled “project pipeline”.

These guidelines are a living document and they will be iterated over time as and when new policies and procedures are agreed by the Fund.

II. Why change the COSOP?

Until recently, IFAD country strategies traditionally served to provide the rationale for country engagement, with the main focus on alignment with the Fund’s objectives. While these strategies often ably demonstrated the proposed assistance programme’s relevance to objectives, they just as often failed to devote sufficient attention to the national policy environment or the activities of other donors. They did not form part of a performance management system; and they lacked a results management framework that could be evaluated to demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of the programme as a whole. In other words, they served as an instrument for planning but not for management, learning and accountability.

Also until recently, COSOPs focused on investment projects as the key instrument for delivering IFAD’s country programme. As IFAD’s development assistance approaches have became more varied (loans, grants, policy dialogue, partnership, knowledge management) and pooled financing arrangements became more popular (joint assistance strategies and sector-wide approaches), there is a need for the country strategy to evolve into a vehicle for linking these elements together to capture areas of synergy and complementarity.

Comments made by the Executive Board, the Independent External Evaluation (IEE) and recent country programme evaluations all highlight the variations noted in COSOP quality. The consensus is that IFAD country strategies should:

• focus more on the rural poor, providing more detail on intended beneficiary groups and targeting approaches;
• provide a clearer picture of IFAD’s comparative advantage;
• have a clear innovation agenda and mechanisms for scaling up activities via strategic partnerships;
• provide a performance management framework, bearing in mind the limitations of logical frameworks when applied to country strategies; the lack of procedures for COSOP monitoring, review and self-evaluation; and the lack of quantitative statistics on country programme performance;
• include a risk management strategy and alternative programme financing scenarios; and
• be harmonized with national poverty reduction strategies and other national strategies and identify areas of synergy between IFAD activities and those of other donors.

III. What is a result-based country programme?

Results-based country programming is not new. Many of IFAD’s partner organizations have been using this approach for many years and a significant amount of learning has already been generated. In the larger development agencies, the results-based approach has its roots in the increasing public concern with development effectiveness, the concerns about the transactions costs implied by uncoordinated donor activities. The emphasis has shifted to results, performance management, learning and accountability, bringing with it the need for improved harmonization and alignment with country-owned strategies and better donor cooperation. The country programme – as the summary statement of a donor’s activities in a country – is the main instrument for addressing all these elements.

Based on the past five years of international experience, the key features of a results-based country programme can be outlined as follows:

• It provides a rationale for the nature of engagement in each country by demonstrating the country programme’s relevance to the country and to the development agency’s goals, mandate and comparative advantage.
• Based on an analysis of the country context (poverty situation, policy context, other donor activities and lessons learned from previous projects), its programme of assistance aims to maximize selectivity, synergy, coherence, relevance and effectiveness.
• It shows how the country programme supports national policymaking through linkage to poverty reduction strategies (or their equivalent) and sectoral strategies. It also indicates areas of complementarity with the activities of other development agencies (thus increasing project selectivity and partnerships).
• It sets out a performance management framework that identifies expected results and corresponding indicators, together with a process for monitoring, reviewing and reporting over time.
• It is a knowledge and learning instrument that builds on experience acquired and lessons learned – using project and country programme monitoring and evaluation (M&E) processes.
• It sets out a strategy for managing risks.
• It builds country ownership of the strategy through broad stakeholder consultation and through obtaining agreement/endorsement of the strategy with the Government (for example though a final wrap-up meeting in the Ministry of Finance).

IV. What are the key featrues of the new COSOP?

Alignment: COSOPs will be aligned with IFAD’s strategic framework and also with national poverty strategies. IFAD’s strategic framework will be a key reference point in the preparation of each individual COSOP. In this regard, the strategic framework document provides the boundaries for COSOP design and implementation.  Two key elements of the strategic framework – the hierarchy of objectives, and the key principles for engagement  - are summarized in Appendix II of the guidelines. In addition, each COSOP will need to align with national poverty strategies where they exist. To the extent feasible, the COSOP design process should be synchronized with the PRSP design process. This is elaborated in Appendix III and Appendix XI of the guidelines.

Joint Ownership: A major difference will be the increased emphasis on joint ownership, which means greater involvement by in-country stakeholders in the design and implementation of COSOPs. It also means ensuring adequate consultation with key stakeholders, harmonization and alignment with country poverty reduction policies and activities of other donors (including harmonization with UN reforms), the avoidance of duplication of activities, and ownership of the COSOP by both the government and IFAD.

Synergy: A fundamental change will be that COSOPs will describe coherent country programmes, comprised of mutually reinforcing instruments and activities that support a limited number of key strategic objectives. The synergy between delivery instruments is expected to enhance the poverty reduction impact and effectiveness of IFAD-supported initiatives.

Results Management Framework: The logical framework is to be replaced by a Results Management Framework. This will maintain a logical structure for the country programme while also allowing COSOP strategic objectives to be aligned with national poverty reduction strategies and an IFAD agenda for policy dialogue.

Accountability: For IFAD to be held accountable for delivering a country programme, the Results Management Framework must be an instrument to enable monitoring and evaluation of the progress in achievement of COSOP objectives, outcomes and milestones over the COSOP period (usually five years). To enable evaluation, there must be a baseline, and the indicators in the Results Framework must be quantified in advance as precisely as feasible. Details on baselines, indicators, and quantification are included in Appendix III

Baselines: The baseline data used to establish the starting point for each COSOP would be gathered in a Baseline Poverty Analysis (described in Appendix VI of the COSOP guidelines) during the design of each COSOP. Baseline data would normally be gathered from existing data sources, not from surveys. The baseline data would need to correspond as closely as possible to the strategic objective statements in each COSOP. Surveys would only be organized when there are significant gaps in the existing data sets, and would be subject to resource availability.

Indicators: The number of quantified indicators for the Results Management Framework should be keep minimal, and should be limited to key relevant data. The selection of the COSOP Strategic Objectives themselves will be heavily influenced by the nature of the ongoing projects in a country programme, given that the Results Management Framework is going to focus on what is going to be delivered on the ground over a five year period. The selection of outcome indicators will by and large be from the list of RIMS level 2 indicators (purpose level statements), while the selection of milestone indicators will usually be from the list of RIMS level 1 indicators (output level statements). However, as the RIMS indicators are rather limited, there will obviously be occasions when CPMs have to complement them with additional indicators.

Quantification: Once the baseline for each of the COSOP strategic objectives is established on the basis of existing data sources, the expected COSOP outcomes and milestones will need to be quantified. The quantification of the outcomes and milestones in the Results Management Framework would be done through two methods:

• Aggregating the expected quantified outcomes and outputs (that correspond to the SO in question) from all the ongoing loans and grants in the portfolio for the implementation period of the COSOP. For example if the Results Management Framework covers a five year period, which is characterized by 3 ongoing IFAD projects, the quantification of indicators would be done by referring to the targets in appraisal reports and progress reports of these three projects, and by estimating how much would be delivered by these projects over the COSOP period.
• Aggregating quantified targets for future projects to be processed during the COSOP period in question. This would imply including the designs and targets for future projects in a separate annex in the COSOP.

Summary Table of Key Changes to the COSOP

	COSOP	Results-based COSOP
Purpose of COSOP	Strategic positioning of IFAD at the country level	Strategic positioning of IFAD at the country level with reference to the Strategic Framework and other IFAD policies/ strategies.  plus Instrument for management, learning and accountability for achieving strategic objectives
IFAD specificity	Discussion on IFAD niche	Systematic description of IFAD’s comparative advantage and competencies in the country
Target group	No discussion of target strategy and target groups	Inclusion of targeting strategy and key file on intended target groups
Ownership	IFAD ownership	Joint IFAD and country ownership In-country stakeholder involvement in COSOP design and implementation
Aid Effectiveness	No systematic analysis	Full alignment with national poverty reduction strategy (or its equivalent) Description of how IFAD is interfacing with harmonization/ alignment initiatives, with emphasis on IFAD’s complementarity
Focus	Lack of focus a frequent criticism (often have more than seven areas of intervention)	Maximum of three strategic objectives in each COSOP (possibly up to five in special cases)
Instruments for delivering the country programme	Mainly loans	Loans, grants, policy dialogue, partnerships, knowledge management
Complementarity of delivery instruments	Rare	Full synergy and complementarity of delivery instruments in support of the same three central strategic objectives
Operational details	Description of future loans not always included	Brief description of future projects included, in particular, projection of likely results from these future projects.
Financing framework	No standard approach	Standard approach following IFI best practice
Results framework	Logical framework	Results management framework
Accountability	Limited accountability (no annual reporting, no mid-term review and no self-evaluation at COSOP completion)	Annual reporting on results management framework indicators, a mid-term review and self-evaluation at completion
Retrofitting	No retrofitting to ongoing activities	Annual reporting on results management framework indicators will cover both ongoing and new activities Limited retrofitting would be encouraged during the life of the COSOP, while respecting any limitations imposed by established legal agreements
Supplementary appendices	Selected key files	Full set of key files

Annual reporting: Once a year, the CPM would report on progress, against the baseline and the quantified targets for the COSOP period. This would be done by aggregating the reported level 1 and level 2 indicators in the RIMS tables for all ongoing projects, and inserting the aggregated totals into the Results Management Framework. As new projects are approved during the COSOP period, the results of these new projects would be added to those of the ongoing projects, to get a total for the whole country programme.

Retrofitting: Retrofitting of ongoing operations to bring them in-line with new strategic priorities will only occur on a limited scale, given the fact that there are only limited opportunities to redesign ongoing operations, and the fact that ongoing projects are bound by approved legal agreements. CPMs will be encouraged to identify any appropriate opportunities where limited retrofitting makes sense, for example during a MTR of an ongoing project.

Financing Framework: Another key change will be the introduction of a systematic linkage between the availability of IFAD resources and country performance (both in terms Government performance in establishment pro-poor policies and the performance of the IFAD project portfolio) via allocations driven by annual calculations under the performance-based allocation system (PBAS). In this regard, IFAD will adopt the same approach as its major International Financing Institution (IFI) partners, with a clear stipulation of allocations for year 1 of the COSOP but with subsequent yearly allocations dependent upon the annual PBAS calculation.

Project Pipeline: Each new COSOP will need to include details on the project pipeline anticipated for the COSOP period.The level of detail on future projects would be restricted to what can realistically be determined at the stage of COSOP design.

Cost efficiency:  The new COSOP approach relies heavily on existing IFAD procedures and processes (as opposed to imposing additional procedures). For example, the annual review of COSOP implementation progress would be done through the existing portfolio review process.  Similarly, many CPMs are already holding annual portfolio review meetings in country, and these can easily be re-termed “annual COSOP implementation progress review meetings”. Finally, it is not expected that IFAD will engage in primary data collection as part of COSOP design. IFAD will rely on gathering existing data to prepare COSOP baselines and working papers. This could be from national documents (PRSP etc), or existing donor studies/reviews (in particular for economic or sector analysis). Previous IFAD formulation and appraisal reports also include useful data for recycling and updating (key files, sectoral reviews etc).

 

Hot links Download full document Revised framework for results-based country strategic opportunities programmes Quick reference guide to the COSOP formulation process Quick reference guide to the COSOP implementation process Client feedback survey Result-based management in UNDP: Selecting Indicators Download COSOPs