Tackling rural poverty, together

Nwanze Okidegbe, Ph.D.

Rural Strategy Advisor for Agriculture and Rural Development, World Bank, Washington

Project leader Okidegbe: Measuring outcome, not output

Donors and partner-governments alike need indicators to measure the benefit of development programmes. In education or health projects, data are readily available to measure and confirm outcomes. Rising literacy rates can be attributed to community education projects. Declining rates of infectious diseases can prove the usefulness of mass vaccination. But effectively monitoring and evaluating investment in agriculture and rural poverty alleviation is chronically handicapped by the lack of an agreed set of performance measures and a scarcity of good data. Now, this may be about to change. Nwanze Okidegbe, Rural Strategy Adviser for Agriculture and Rural Development at the World Bank, outlines a unique Platform initiative to rally donors and partner-countries around a new set of core indicators, speaking with Timothy Nater in Washington.

Nater: Why are indicators important?

Okidegbe: More and more citizens in both developed and developing countries are demanding to see results from development assistance. Developing country governments are increasingly feeling this pressure. They recognise they have to improve their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems in order to track progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). But they know that their M&E system will only be as good as the quality of the underlying data.

Measuring progress towards achieving the MDGs won’t be effective or yield generally accepted results without a reliable, commonly agreed standard of indicators. So our core indicators initiative couldn’t be more topical and timely. It’s about measuring aid effectiveness on reducing rural poverty, donor harmonisation and alignment, and implementing the Paris Declaration. The Platform offers an ideal forum for donors and partner-countries to work out common policies and practices on this issue.

There’s a saying attributed to Albert Einstein that goes, “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” What will you be counting?
The conventional measurements of concrete inputs and outputs are useful, but not sufficient. What counts is the outcome. The focus of M&E is moving more and more from performance-based outputs to ultimate results. For example, when you’re evaluating a programme to improve rural services, you need indicators that measure how satisfied the beneficiaries are with the services they’re receiving. How does a given service or product resulting from investment in this programme affect the lives of men, women and children? This new approach means going to them directly and asking them.

Data drawn from outputs alone have in the past occasionally given a distorted picture. It’s sometimes taken four or five years to realise that a given intervention failed to meet its development objectives. By contrast, this new results-based approach demands speedy results, collecting and acting on data in far less time than before.

What’s the background?
This initiative springs from OECD Development Advisory Committee’s Joint Venture on Managing for Development Results. The Joint Venture operates under the auspices of the OECD/DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness and Donor Practices, which stems, in turn, from the Paris Declaration. Among other things, its purpose is to hold donors to their commitments under the Paris Declaration.

Those donor commitments include linking country programming and funding to country results, relying on partner-country systems to do the results-oriented reporting and monitoring, and harmonising donors’ individual monitoring and reporting requirements. And those donor commitments are crucial because partner-countries have long complained about the time they waste in complying with a proliferation of different donor requirements. In return, donors can expect partner-countries to show results through greater efficiency in implementing development assistance, including improvements in their governance.