Update on OECD/ DAC Evaluation standards and advice

The OECD Development Assistance Committee appears to have moved part of its evaluation pages to new sites. That means that some links in older OECD/DAC-related posts here may be broken - my apologies! Some day I will get help to update all links since 2008, when I started blogging. In the meantime, here are a few important links that work:

• The opening page OECD/DAC Evaluation of development programmes
• The DAC Quality Standards for Development Evaluation (2010) are highly commendable reading for anyone involved in development evaluations. These are the standards all major donors use. Also nice, the version with French and Arabic translation. The search function might take you to additional translations hidden somewhere on the cavernous OECD site (see following title).
• The DAC Criteria for Evaluating Development Assistance  - you remember, relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability, all clearly defined and illustrated with key questions.
• The Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results Based Management, translated into Arabic, Chinese, German and many other languages. I cannot find any page which displays the many translations that do exist, but you can find the one you need if you use the search function on the page (for instance, by typing 'DAC evaluation criteria Chinese' into the search box)
• Also helpful, the recent (2013) Evaluating Development Activities: 12 Lessons from the OECD DAC which, once and for all, make it clear that there is no single gold standard that would work for all evaluations.

I would encourage all evaluation commissioners, evaluators and other evaluation users to regularly refer to these standards. BUT! Just copying the definitions and key questions for the OECD/DAC evaluation criteria is not enough to build terms of reference (TOR) that answer the questions you need to have answered for your particular evaluation. As the '12 lessons' (last title in the list above) show, there are even situations where it is better to refrain from commissioning an evaluation. Bonne lecture!
OECD has kindly added a comment which shows the way to the OECD/DAC web page that lists all key documents. Read the comment by clicking on the little envelope below or click here to get to the site.