Corporate Evaluation Unit, Central Project Evaluations Section

External Quality Assurance Central Project Evaluations GIZ evaluations are an important part of our efforts to maximise the effectiveness of our work. They systematically analyse and assess quality and benefits, thus supporting the targeted and needs-based implementation of development measures of the German Federal Government and other commissioning parties and helping to continuously improve our service delivery processes. Central project evaluations account for the large majority of GIZ evaluations. GIZ uses central project evaluations to regularly and systematically investigate the results, cost-effectiveness and sustainability of projects that it implements with partner organisations on behalf of the the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Evaluations are conducted by external evaluators and steered by GIZ"s independent Corporate Unit Evaluation in line with mandatory, standardised quality standards. The reports solely reflect the opinion and assessment of the external evaluators. The clarity of the analysis, conclusions drawn and assessment must, however, be guaranteed and is reviewed by the Corporate Unit Evaluation In order to increase accountability and transparency, GIZ Management Board decided to publish the evaluation reports. To create the utmost use for GIZ partners worldwide, the reports are generally written in English, French or Spanish. In addition to the approx. 50-page main reports, the evaluators compile a summary ("seven-pager") and an overview with central results ("one-pager") according to the given formats. GIZ bases its evaluations on the standards for evaluation of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Evaluation (DeGEval): usefulness, feasibility, fairness and accuracy as well as the quality standards for development evaluation of the OECD-DAC. As a basis for the development of quality assurance instruments, the Evaluation Unit formulates quality standards for process quality, methodological quality and product quality. These include comprehensible statements through the presentation of data, facts and figures based on sources, careful analysis of the contribution of projects to outcomes and impacts, and a more comprehensible evaluation of the project on the basis of the OECD/DAC criteria through standardised evaluation dimensions, which among other things improve the comparability of the projects. The methodological requirements include in particular contribution analysis and efficiency analysis (follow the money approach with input-output analysis). The evaluation reports of the evaluations are published. To ensure the methodological quality of the CPE, the Evaluation Unit developed annotated report structures for the inception report and evaluation report, which provide guidance for evaluation teams. Also, quality checks of all project evaluations are carried out on the basis of a predetermined quality grid with defined criteria. Experience has shown that it is also partly necessary to comment with regards to language, style and formatting to ensure the desired quality. Therefore, during quality checks the application of the binding GIZ CPE report writing guidelines have to be checked and commented in a general way as well. However, final proofreading and editing is conducted by external editors after the quality check and finalization of the reports and not part of this assignment. The present assignment comprises the performance of quality checks of inception and evaluation reports as well as a separate evaluation summary and a factsheet on the evaluation results.