Image Credit: EBRD

September 7, 2022/EBRD

The 2022 Asian Evaluation Week (AEW) will be held virtually on 13-15 September 2022. The AEW is a leading evaluation knowledge sharing platform in the Asia and Pacific region, jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Finance, PRC through the Asia-Pacific Finance and Development Institute (AFDI) and the Asian Development Bank’s Independent Evaluation Department (IED). The event gathers a large audience from over 100 countries and thought leaders, and focuses on the use of evaluation and evaluation knowledge.

This year’s theme: “Reframing Evaluation for Green, Inclusive, and Resilient Recovery: Shaping the Economy Post-pandemic,” sets the tone for forging ahead in a post pandemic world. The sessions of the 2022 AEW are being organized around these subthemes:

• Innovating and retooling evaluation towards resilient recovery
• Driving collective actions on country-based evaluation
• Influential evidence-based evaluation for green, healthy, and inclusive societies.

The Independent Evaluation Department (EvD) of EBRD is organizing a session titled: “Evaluations in time of crisis: what have we learned in the past two years?”

The COVID-19 pandemic and the outburst of the war in Ukraine have pushed the independent evaluation function across IFIs to rethink how to go about their evaluative work in order to remain relevant and useful at times of ongoing uncertainty. Since the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, many efforts were made to adapt the work of the independent evaluation function to remain relevant and address the challenges of the pandemic that affected our capacity to conduct evaluations, such as travel restrictions and the subsequent inability to collect empirical data and engage stakeholders in the field. Many lessons can be drawn from this period to be better prepared for the new normal. For instance, on the need to use proxies and find alternative data sources and innovative methodologies to shorten the traditional feedback loops and support our organizations respond effectively to the COVID-19 crisis.

Four key areas emerged in the past two years in which the independent evaluation function can have an impact in times of crisis. First, improving the blueprints of interventions designed quickly (and disbursed rapidly) to respond to the massive financial mobilization required by the crisis response. Second, feeding in the short-term immediate results deriving from those emergency interventions to support the decision-making process. Third, understanding the overall results of the response package and deriving lessons from the implementation of these interventions that can be shared within the institutions and more broadly across institutions. Finally, contributing to the institutional preparedness to face future emergencies and crises.

Remaining relevant and impactful in times of crisis entailed a high degree of innovation and flexibility for evaluation teams. The evaluation departments have adjusted on-going evaluations and increasingly embedded in the design of new evaluations the use of remote evidence gathering techniques, in particular AI, big data and other forms of technology. The evaluation teams have relied more on remote interviews to reach out to national stakeholders and on national expertise to conduct field visits for primary data collection. The work plans have been adapted to accommodate new priorities led by the principle of the utility of the evaluation function: rapid assessments, real time evaluations, and knowledge products such as the synthesis of lessons from past evaluations and profiling notes about issues and challenges that decision makers are facing in the mist of the crisis. These are only few examples of a collective effort to help inform the response to the crisis and contribute with evaluation evidence to a resilient recovery.

It is now time to pause and take stock of the lessons that have emerged in the past two years for evaluation departments and reflect on their role in supporting future crisis. Thus, the key objectives of this session are as follows:

• To discuss the challenges faced by evaluators during the COVID-19 pandemic first and more recently in the environment of multiple crises triggered by the war in Ukraine;
• To share the actions taken by evaluation departments to rapidly respond to those challenges;
• To exchange the lessons learned since 2020, including examples of what worked and what did not work and why in the evaluation field during these crises; and
• To brainstorm on the way forward.

People

• Moderator: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Evaluation Department Chief Evaluator – Véronique Salze-Lozac’h, SalzeloV@ebrd.com 
• Panelist 1: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – Eva Cassel, Board member – cassele@ebrd.com
• Panelist 2: OECD – Megan Grace Kennedy-Chouane, Head of Evaluation, Development Co-operation Directorate – MeganGrace.KENNEDY-CHOUANE@oecd.org
• Panelist 3: Asian Development Bank – Emmanuel Jimenez, Director General, Independent Evaluation Department ejimenez@adb.org
• Panelist 4: International Monetary Fund – Charles Collyns, Director of Evaluation Department, CCollyns@imf.org