“Standard Assessment Framework”: A Proposal to Fill a Gap in the “Paris Declaration”

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Hellmut W. Eggers
Daniel Svoboda

Abstract

Background: The “Paris Declaration” (PD), is a statement by which, in 2005, leading representatives/actors of International Development Cooperation agreed on a series of ways and means with a view to improving aid effectiveness. Among those ways and means, the need for the establishment, by partner countries, of national “Assessment Frameworks” was stressed without, however, alluding to the nature and content of such frameworks. This must be considered a serious gap. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to make a proposal with a view to filling in this gap and thus to provide Policy and Decision Makers, Program and Project Planners, Implementers and Evaluators as well as Parliaments and other professionally interested quarters, with an operational instrument allowing to seriously enhance chances of realizing the objective of the PD: improving aid-effectiveness. Setting: Developing countries anywhere and their developed partner countries and partner organizations. Intervention: The article is addressing the problems and the possibilities of any systematic intervention: Policies, Programs and Projects, designed to further the development of developing countries. Research Design: The article undertakes to address the problems and opportunities mentioned above by establishing a “Standard Assessment Framework” (SAF) designed to concentrate the minds of all actors on the creation of sustainable benefits for the target groups of development interventions; welding Planning and Evaluation into one single mutually reinforcing system, always to be kept up to date. Data Collection and Analysis: The SAF has been developed over time by numerous inputs from a great variety of sources and presents, thus, a depository of lessons of experience still open to further inputs and improvements. The templates of members of the “Development Assistance Committee” (DAC) of the Paris based OECD were, i. a., systematically taken into consideration. Findings: The SAF represents, thus, in a nutshell, the most important findings of interventions too numerous to be mentioned individually or to be tracked. It therefore presents simultaneously, however, a general grid that should structure findings in a much more detailed way, to be consigned to a SAF Data-Base that can be built up on the basis of experiences made in the past and on those accumulating further under current evaluation work. Keywords: Standard Assessment Framework; planning and evaluation; learning and operational feedback; common development language; Paris Declaration

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How to Cite
Eggers, H. W., & Svoboda, D. (2010). “Standard Assessment Framework”: A Proposal to Fill a Gap in the “Paris Declaration”. Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation, 7(15), 306–312. https://doi.org/10.56645/jmde.v7i15.289
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Ideas to Consider