Metaevaluation of Project and Programme Evaluations in 2017-2020

Evaluations are conducted in order to learn from successes and setbacks, and the lessons learned are used for further enhancing the quality of development policy and cooperation. Metaevaluations assess the quality of decentralized evaluations and aggregate findings from them to form an overall picture of the quality of development cooperation.

Decentralised evaluations assess the projects and programmes of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs (MFA) and are commissioned by the units, departments or embassies responsible for the project or programme in question. Centralised – comprehensive, policy level – evaluations are managed by the MFA’s Development Evaluation Unit (EVA-11) which also commissions metaevaluations regularly.

The Terms of Reference (ToRs) lay the foundation for the implementation of evaluations. There was a strong link between the quality of the ToR and the evaluation report: good ToRs produce good evaluation reports.

About half of the reports were of satisfactory quality, the rest with a need for improvement and a few were inadequate.

Gender equality is better mainstreamed than other CCOs in Finnish development cooperation.

A large majority of the evaluations are deemed to be useful. However, insights from decentralised evaluations are not systematically exploited for organisational learning but they remain on the individual level.

Evaluation report

Metaevaluation of project and programme evaluations in 2017-2020 (PDF, 276 pages, 8.9 MB)

Summary

From Obligation to Appreciation – Selected Highlights from the Evaluation (PDF, 4 sivua, 3.08 MB)

Ministry's response to the evaluation

Management response (PDF, in Finnish, 2 pages, 102 KB)

Webinar recording and presentation of evaluation results

PowerPoint presentation of evaluation results - Webinar 31 March 2022 (PDF, 38 pages, 4 MB)

Please contact eva-11@formin.fi if you would like to have the webinar recording.