Evaluation of the Development Partnership Program of the Austrian Development Agency

Project Context

Over the last decade, about 10 bilateral donors have launched development partnership programs. These programs aim at creating win-win situations at the public-private interface by identifying or creating project situations where public and private interests are aligned – at least to some extent. It is hoped that in this way all project partners can achieve their individual goals with less resource needs and with less risk. While some bilateral donors have run development partnership programs for almost 10 years now and a wealth of operational experience exists, comparably few rigorous program or project evaluations have been conducted and, therefore, little knowledge exists on relevance, effectiveness and efficiency of those programs and their individual projects.

The Austrian Development Agency (ADA) has launched its own development partnership program in 2003 and has recently decided to commission a full external evaluation both on the program and on the project level. The Global Public Policy Institute has won the evaluation contract in an international competitive award process.

Project Objectives

The evaluation is divided into three phases:

Phase one consists of a desk study complemented by intense interactions with the Austrian Ministry for European and International Affairs (BMeiA) the ADA and the program implementation unit.

Phase two consist of the review of six selected projects that are assessed from both the development and from the business perspective and includes field visits to all project partners in Europe and in the partner countries. In addition, a series of interviews is conducted to assess performance on the program level.

In phase three, findings on the program and project level are synthesized and recommendations for the future orientation of the program, as well as for operational improvements are developed.

The entire evaluation puts equal weight on the private and on the public perspective. This implies for example that, in addition to standard development evaluation tools , several business frameworks such as market entry strategy analysis (e.g. SWOT and PEST frameworks or Porter’s models) and project valuation tools (discounted cash flows, net present value) are used.