2015 sees the start of a unique opportunity to transform development finance -€“ let'€™s commit to learning from the past to realize a better future.

Last week’s Spring Meetings of the IMF and World Bank Group buzzed with the promise of transforming development finance. Leaders from bilateral and multilateral institutions, the private sector, civil society, and academia gathered to debate challenges and opportunities. Conversations started that will shape the outcome document of the Addis Ababa summit in July -€“ IEG contributed to the dialogue by hosting successful events as part of the Spring Meetings.

"Without finance there cannot be success" were Ban Ki-Moon's words. He was referring to achieving the ambitious Sustainable Development Goals to be adopted in September this year.

Framing it like this you might have the impression that the debate is narrowly focused on financing development assistance. Far from it!

The agenda reaches much further. It encompasses public and private, domestic and international, and increasingly “pooled” sources of funding in various forms. The ultimate objective: unleashing more, and more diversely composed resources to finance development and reduce risks associated with all forms of volatility, building enhanced resilience.

So what does evaluation have to do with this? Evaluation focuses on outcomes, development effectiveness and impact. But, isn't "€œfinance" an input? Well, yes and no.

The post-2015 agenda in the making -€“ from development finance, to Sustainable Development Goals and climate change -€“ focuses on an architecture that allows for various sources of finance to be tapped, and moneys used efficiently and effectively to support the achievement of desired sustainable development outcomes. And that is where evaluation plays a role: putting together evidence to show what has worked in the past, how to replicate success and avoid repeating mistakes.

And there is much to learn from our evaluation of World Bank Group support over time, and across the spectrum, including learning that relates to:

• public financial management, including, for example, benefits that can be derived from a combination of policy lending and technical assistance for capacity development, rethinking ways to finance health systems or improving in-country procurement systems, and understanding the fiscal implications of public-private partnerships;
   
• private sector development and how it can work to stimulate domestic private investment, whether through investment climate reforms, innovation and entrepreneurship development, trade finance, and targeted SME interventions, as well as international private finance through public-private partnerships, loans and equity investments, and guarantees; and from evaluation of,
   
• the use of international public and private resources, pooling these resources in innovative ways to invest in shared concerns such as climate finance, global health issues, or fragility and violence, and coming up with lessons for shared accountability.

Upcoming evaluations will speak to other important aspects of the conversation spanning the conversion of resource-richness into sustainable public finance for broad-based growth, financing electricity access, as well as financial inclusion and capital markets.

Evaluation findings are too rich for one blog, the themes too far reaching to address lessons to just one audience. So, in order to best share the range and sum of what we know about the past that can help shape the future, we are planning the development of a dynamic online resource that will allow us to: (i) more directly and continuously update stakeholders in this vital discourse who matter, and who care about the latest findings from our independent evaluation; and (ii) revisit and re-present learning from the substantial body of past work that continues to be relevant in the new context.

Help us shape our efforts and better respond to the burning issues. Let us know your main concerns and questions, what interests you, and how our work can best be targeted and exploited to influence change for the better at this critical juncture in development history.