Managing Aid Evaluation Processes:The Swedish Experience 

By Göran Schill, Swedish Embassy

Successful evaluation depends on adequate planning more than anything else:

• User-orientation is necessary

• Selectivity is essential

• Assessing evaluability is crucial

User-orientation: who should actually use the evaluation and for what purposes?

• Involve the intended users early on

• Define a specific evaluation purpose

• Identify matching evaluation questions

Selectivity: how can the evaluation be focused in order to best serve its purpose?

• Review the evaluated programme

• Zero in on key components of the evaluated programme

• Limit the number of evaluation questions

Evaluability assessment: can your evaluation questions in fact be answered as expected?

• Is there an intervention logic specific enough to enable

evaluation?

• Is relevant information available?

• What is the timing of the evaluation in relation to the evaluated programme?

General reminders:

• Development impacts may take time and are generally limited in reach

• The prospects for causal attribution tend to be overestimated

• Don’t expect development impacts to be measurable