We live in an era of uncertainty. Compounding crises are exacting a heavy toll on people and communities across the world. Overlapping global challenges such as the COVID pandemic, climate change and increased fragility and conflict have led to rising poverty, growing national indebtedness, and the loss of human capital. In confronting both immediate and slower-moving crises, development programs must acknowledge countries’ interdependence, cross-border effects, and the global nature of the challenges we all face.

Effective evaluation has a critical role in helping to navigate this landscape and promoting development effectiveness, by bringing evidence about which solutions have worked, and in rebuilding trust in governments and public institutions by holding them accountable to their citizens and stakeholders.

In this blog, I would like to discuss three core values of effective evaluation and outline three strategic priorities through which the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) will aim to increase the value of evaluation to global development in the coming years.

Three core values for impactful evaluation

I believe three core values are essential to making evaluation useful and impactful.

The first is independence. Institutional independence and independence of thinking allow us to produce objective, unbiased, evidence-based assessments which are credible and useful for our stakeholders. Those are crucial ingredients for integrity.

The second is engagement with stakeholders at all levels, from governments and intended beneficiaries of interventions to WBG management. Listening to everyone’s needs and constraints helps to produce evidence relevant and useful to the questions our stakeholders are grappling with. Engagement also builds trust, which helps us to have difficult conversations when needed. We need to communicate effectively with different stakeholders and develop dissemination and learning strategies to adapt to their decision-making needs.

Finally, evaluations should be timely and of high quality. For IEG, this starts with a more strategic approach to defining our work program to align with the new WBG priorities. This includes decisions on evaluation topics guided by theories of change and identified gaps in evidence, while balancing the growing demand for real-time evidence to address immediate crises with a steady focus on long-term development challenges. The evaluations themselves need to be ‘bullet proof’, built on solid evaluation frameworks and rigorous methods. They also need to come at the right time to feed into decision-making and learning.

Three strategic priorities for more impactful evaluations

Together with these core values, which guide our approach to evaluation, I have set out three medium term strategic priorities to increase the impact of evaluation on development challenges.

First, we must harness new data, technology and methods to improve the rigor, quality and usefulness of evaluations. New data and technology allow us to answer new questions – and indeed old ones – with greater efficiency, precision, and insight. I am proud that IEG’s Methods Team always strives to push the boundaries of evaluation practice to answer complex questions. They are applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyse text and imagery and experimenting with Generative AI and Large Language Models, as well as using data science and AI to help design and conduct evaluations. Recently, they organized a symposium dedicated to the use of geospatial analysis for evaluation.

My second priority is to enhance IEG’s local engagement and increase our support for Evaluation Capacity Development. Over the coming years, IEG will be exploring how we can engage even more closely with country partners in the design, implementation, dissemination and learning from our evaluations. Our country partners should benefit from the lessons we identify, along with our World Bank counterparts. The voices of people impacted by World Bank projects should be included more systematically in our evaluations, starting from their design, their implementation, and the dissemination of their findings.

We deliver our support for capacity development through the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI). I saw the transformative impact of this work during a visit to South Africa, which has helped build national Monitoring and Evaluation systems, strengthen evaluation capacity, and share best practices. To confront compounding global challenges, all countries must have the capacity to design evidence-based policies and to track their progress.

Finally, we must redouble our focus on outcomes. We have traditionally relied on project performance ratings for assessing effectiveness, which are valuable but have limitations. We must go further by leveraging a range of methods, such as causal contribution and counterfactual analysis, to assess the outcomes and impacts of WBG interventions at the project, sector or country level.

Looking back to shape the future: a new direction for evaluation

In conclusion, for evaluation functions to be useful and impactful in the current global context, we must engage with stakeholders, produce strategic, relevant, and timely work programs and high quality, independent evaluations that are communicated in a tailored, user-friendly manner.

The world is in turmoil, and we must work together to strengthen a culture of accountability and learning from the past. We must ensure that the policies and interventions that are put in place to tackle local and global challenges are based on unbiased, rigorous, and useful evidence of what works and what doesn’t. This will improve the effectiveness of development interventions. By learning from the past, we give ourselves the best chance of a brighter future.