Overview of The Evaluation System
Our current evaluation system is composed of the Evaluation Study Committee, the Advisory Committee on Evaluation, the Project Implementation Departments, and the Planning and Coordination Department.
The overall policies of our project evaluation are determined by the Evaluation Study Committee. The committee, which consists of the Deputy Coordinator as the chair and Assistant Directors in charge of relevant Departments as members, examines and deliberates on the basic policies of project evaluation and the feedback methods of evaluation results.
The Advisory Committee on Evaluation, which consists of the Assistant Coordinator as the chair and external experts (scholars and representatives of NGOs) with expertise in evaluation as members, offers advice to the Evaluation Study Committee on the evaluation systems and methods and reviews the internal project evaluation results, thus contributing to improvements in the objectivity of the evaluation.
Individual project evaluations are conducted by the project implementation Departments. The Project Implementation Departments carry out project-level evaluations and utilize the results for operation and management of the projects.
The Office of Evaluation is in charge of planning and coordination in relation to evaluation in general, including improvements in evaluation methods and promotion of feedback of evaluation results, while supporting and supervising the Project Implementation Departments to perform appropriate project evaluations. It also undertakes program-level evaluations such as thematic evaluation.
We have made the following efforts for enhancing and expanding evaluation in order to operate effective and efficient projects, as well as execute accountability:
o Consistent evaluation from ante to post stages
o Evaluation covering various programs
o Securing transparency and objectivity in evaluation.
A study that we conducted in 2016 revealed that, in the course of improving projects, evaluation results are used for various purposes, such as planning and operating individual projects, formulating cooperation policies by sector and issue, improving systems for project implementation.
Furthermore, in order to make evaluation more useful, development and improvement of various evaluation methods have been promoted. For instance, evaluation methods of program approach are being developed in response to the strengthening of program approach that has been promoted recently, and methods of participatory evaluation are being researched in the midst of a focus on assistance directly reaching people.
In order to ensure objectivity of evaluation, we promote evaluation by third parties by involving more external experts in evaluation study. On the other hand, project evaluation mainly aimed at management of a project is generally conducted by us as internal evaluation. Internal evaluation has merits; for example, evaluation based on actual situations is possible and the evaluation results can be fed back easily to the decision-making process for the future. However, transparency and objectivity may not necessarily be secured when compared to external evaluation.
In response, we have an Advisory Committee on Evaluation conduct secondary evaluation, paying attention to ensuring transparency and objectivity in results of internal evaluation.