Our Goals

Improving World Bank Group Development Results Through Excellence in Evaluation

IEG’s overriding goal is to help the World Bank Group build on its successes and avoid unnecessarily repeating past mistakes. Our two medium-term objectives are:

• To deepen the evidence about the results of the World Bank Group towards the achievement of its goals of accelerating poverty reduction and boosting shared prosperity. In that, we are focusing on interim targets for 2020.
• To generate evidence on the early implementation experience of the World Bank Group Strategy to ensure shareholders and managements can make necessary mid-course corrections. By doing so, we also aim to promote a stronger internal culture for results, accountability, and learning.

What We Do

To achieve our goals, we undertake a diverse set of evaluations:

• To address strategic or systemic issues,
• To focus on specific countries or projects,
• To ensure a systematic assessment of portfolio performance, and
• To promote greater learning from IEG’s work.

We are committed to continuously expanding the use of innovative evaluation methods to complement traditional approaches, including assessing outcomes against stated objectives, benchmarks, and standards.

To enhance the effectiveness of our work, we invest in systematic outreach to bring our findings and recommendations to the right stakeholders, at the right time, and in the right format.

IEG Theory of Change

IEG has developed a theory of change to clarify how evaluation contributes to the Bank Group’s development effectiveness by fostering learning, accountability for results, and evidence-based decision-making.

Download Summary IEG's Theory of Change  |  Download Detailed IEG's Theory of Change

Leadership

Oscar Calvo-Gonzalez
Director-General, Evaluation, World Bank Group (Acting)

Oscar has been with the World Bank since 2006, where he has worked directly with a diverse group of client countries. His operational experience cuts across a broad range of economic policy issues and Bank instruments.

Prior to joining IEG he was Practice Manager in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice from 2015 to 2019. Previously he was Program Leader in the Central America Country Department where he led lending operations and analytical work. Before working on Central America he was a country economist for a number of countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia regions.

Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a Principal Economist at the European Central Bank, where he focused on the then EU acceding countries. He has taught at the London School of Economics and Georgetown University and has recently edited the book Behavioral Insights for Development: Cases from Central America. He has published articles in refereed journals on wide-ranging issues such as the effectiveness of public expenditure, the application of behavioral insights in economic policy issues, and the impact of foreign aid.

Oscar holds a BA from the University of Leicester and MSc and PhD degrees from the London School of Economics.

IEG Director General Mandate