Identifying and measuring results for sustainable systemic change in market development: A pre study for strategic evaluation of Sida’s market portfolio
Sweden has for decades aimed to work towards enhanced efficiency and effectiveness in development cooperation, and among the goals in this context, worked towards a stronger focus on demonstrating results. This is explicitly part of the work with the Millennium Development Goals and the agenda initiated at the Paris Conference on Aid Effectiveness in 2005, further elaborated in Accra in 2008, and most recently in Busan in 2011.
In the same vein, the Swedish Government is continuously asking Sida to formulate draft expectations about results to be achieved in development cooperation. This is currently done through a new and revised format for bilateral and regional geographical development cooperation strategies, so called “Results Strategies”. During early parts of 2013, Sida expects the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to request Sida to submit input to Results Strategies for a large number of countries. Results have to date primarily been formulated in results matrices at the sector level in bilateral and regional strategies, whereas the new strategy documents will state, in a more crosscutting and sector-neutral terminology, the development challenges Swedish support is to address.
In line with the increased focus on results in Swedish development cooperation there has been an ongoing discussion during the past year on whether there is a need for a thematic/strategic evaluation of Sida’s support to Market Development. Sida is aware of a number of ongoing or recently finished evaluation initiatives. To enable Sida to take an informed decision on whether there is a need for Sida to initiate an evaluation of its own support, this current assignment is excepted to provide information on the current frontier of evaluation within this field.
The outputs from this assignment shall also be able to serve as background for the consultant for future possible requests for support from Sida in relation to the development of specific proposals for country-specific Swedish Development Cooperation Results Strategies.
The work undertaken by ORGUT through the Assignment served two main aims. The first purpose was to assist Sida to prepare for its work with results strategies by enhancing the knowledge and understanding of Sida staff about results chains in the area of economic development. Secondly, this Assignment also took stock of which fields within market development relevant to Sida’s, where there is a systematic lack of reliable knowledge on results and hence a need for further evaluation. This second objective links to Sida’s possible need for a future larger evaluation of how Sida specifically works with market development. Such a future evaluation would broadly aim to take stock of both the extent to which Sida, in its work has been able to internalize good practice within market development, as well as evaluate results of this support.