Conference Summary (PDF) | Conference Agenda (PDF)

On April 28-29th in Vienna, the World Bank and the European Commission co- hosted the final regional conference for the Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity Development Project in the Western Balkans and Turkey. The conference was the culmination of a two-year project and convened all participating governments across sectors to discuss lessons learned, namely the experience with formulating and vetting the indicators across countries and sectors.

This project targeted five sectors: Employment, Civil Service Reform, Justice, Agriculture and Rural Development and Private Sector Development. The event included over 100 participants from seven countries, including the Deputy Prime Minister of Albania, line ministers from Albania, Kosovo, and Montenegro, and Deputy Ministers from Albania and Serbia. The event served to stimulate the use of indicators to inform evidence-based policy making and performance-based management by senior policy makers.

The conference also included sector-specific sessions to support senior technical line ministry representatives in their monitoring and evaluation practice, by linking the indicators developed under the project to the high-level discussion of monitoring and evaluation, thereby generating increased engagement, ownership and accountability at all levels.

A key message from the conference was that countries that must lead the process of identifying targets for the indicators and adopting the proposed indicators into strategic documents. European Commission representatives emphasized that countries must work towards target development and that these indicators will be essential in IPA 2 programming. Most significantly, government counterparts including senior decision makers reaffirmed the importance of measuring government performance, selecting the right indicators, and setting targets.