The Independent Development Evaluation (IDEV) of the African Development Bank opened its biennial Development Evaluation Week on Thursday in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
The two-day event focuses on the contribution evaluation can make to achieving greater development impact through learning from the past.
“Learning constructively from past successes, the Bank considers mistakes and experiences critical building blocks and tools for promoting accountability in development work, and a key to more powerful development impact,” Vice President Pierre Guislain said in welcoming remarks made on behalf of Bank President Akinwumi Adesina.
IDEV evaluations and knowledge activities are critical to informing the strategic direction required for delivering high impact results on the Bank’s High 5’s, the bank said in a press release.
The Bank’s High 5 priorities -Light Up and Power Africa; Feed Africa; Integrate Africa; Industrialize Africa; and Improve the quality of life for the people of Africa- complement Africa’s ambitious 2063 targets, seek to plug the continent’s infrastructure gap, and catalyze development projects that will lift the future generation out of poverty.
Many African countries on the path to transformation, struggle with the ability to develop measurable outcomes, indicators and objectives that remain relevant and efficient. Central to the capacity to successfully drive the transformation, will be effective monitoring and evaluation tools that give governments the opportunity to learn from successes and failures, the release said.
Building on evidence-based evaluation and lessons learned ensures that ongoing and future projects avoid the mistakes of the past and that policy makers and implementers are armed with information to make changes or to take new direction, to ensure efficient outcomes.
The event is attended by more than 400 government policy- and decision-makers, representatives from development partners, research and academic institutions, evaluation associations and civil society.