IEG's Phase 2 Report of the Bank’s involvement in global programs recommended, among other things, that IEG should include global programs in its standard evaluation and reporting processes to the Board. This includes:
- Reviewing selected program-level evaluations conducted by Bank-supported global programs (both internally and externally managed) much as OED reviews other self-evaluations at the project and country levels.
- Working with the Bank’s global partners to develop international standards for the evaluation of global programs.
IEG is moving forward on both components of this recommendation at the same time, since they are complementary. Each is contributing to progress on the other.
Guidelines for Global Program Reviews
IEG has developed a set of guidelines for its own Global Program Reviews (GPRs) in consultation with the Bank’s units involved with global programs, operations policy, and trust fund management. These guidelines  – which presume the existence of a prior external evaluation commissioned by the governing body of the program being reviewed – build upon the evaluation framework in IEG's Phase 2 Review and incorporate lessons derived from the experience with three pilot GPRs that IEG completed in FY06.
International Standards for Global Program Evaluations
IEG made a presentation on this topic to the recent meeting of the OECD/DAC Network on Development Evaluation in Paris on March 31, 2006. The meeting was attended not only by members from the evaluation units of 23 bilateral agencies, but also by observers from the IFC, IMF, UNDP, AfDB, AsDB, EBRD, and IDB. The meeting expressed broad support for the idea of developing a set of generally accepted evaluation principles for the evaluation of global and regional programs and requested that IEG play a leading role in doing so.
Accordingly, IEG is now preparing the first draft of a set of principles under the auspices of the DAC Evaluation Network. Then IEG is planning to invite a representative group of stakeholders to a consultative workshop – scheduled for September 28 and 29 in Paris – in order to review this draft ahead of a formal discussion at the next meeting of the DAC Evaluation Network in November 2006. IEG intends to invite representatives of the following stakeholders groups to the workshop, while keeping the participants to a manageable number of about 50:
- Bilateral donor agencies
- UN organizations
- MDBs
- Foundations
- Developing countries
- NGOs/private sector
- Global programs (management)
- Global program evaluators
IEG also plans to prepare background materials for the workshop, which will be accessible prior to the workshop to participants who have registered for the workshop. This will include an in-depth comparative review of 36 recent global and regional program evaluations, links to these program web-sites and their evaluations (where the latter are publicly available), and links to other, already existing evaluation principles and standards of relevance to global programs.
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