Monitoring and Evaluation

Tightened budgets and an increasingly critical public opinion in donor and recipient countries regarding the effectiveness and efficiency of development cooperation in recent years have put policymakers and donors under pressure for results. This pressure introduced a paradigm shift – the so-called Aid Effectiveness Agenda. It refers to five principles: ownership for developing countries, alignment to partner countries’ objectives and local systems, harmonization of donors’ action, managing for results and mutual accountability.

Progress has been made since the Paris Declaration in 2005. But monitoring and evaluation reports on the implementation of aid effectiveness principles show that concentrating on clear results and how to measure these is still a challenge. Participatory and comprehensive monitoring and independent evaluations founded on baseline data cannot yet be taken for granted. In many fields, it is still not know what works in which context and why.   Implementing development cooperation is one of DS’s core businesses.