The Ministry of Agriculture and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) last week conducted a two-day training session on the impact evaluation of projects for key staff at the ministry.

The Ministry is supporting the results-based management concept, which is being promoted in modern management principles, for all the projects it is undertaking, a press release from the Government Information Agency (GINA) said. The ministry has a number of projects directed towards improving agricultural services, enhancing the drainage and irrigation systems, improving the livelihood of poor rural communities, and improving the capacity of the private sector to export agricultural products.

The training also included methods of evaluation, collecting data for evaluations, the implementation of evaluations and writing evaluation plans. The ministry will get more support in developing the Evaluation Plan. In addition, it will be establishing an application package for storage, retrieval and reporting data for monitoring and evaluation.

GINA said these objectives are expected to be achieved mainly through the Agricultural Export Diversification Programme and the Agricultural Support Services Programme funded by the IDB, the Rural Enterprise Agricultural Development Project funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Conservancy Adaptation Project funded by the GEF initiative of the World Bank.

In recent years, the IDB has instituted a number of measures to boost the effectiveness of projects it funds. In October of 2008, the Bank’s Board of Directors approved the Development Effectiveness Framework to ensure that IDB products can demonstrate results. As part of this framework, the IDB is focusing on improving the ‘evaluability’ of proposed projects during the design stage, which requires developing evaluation plans in conjunction with the design of the project.

In implementing the framework, the IDB is offering technical support to IDB project teams and government partners in setting up evaluations that measure development effectiveness. It is also providing guidelines for assessing development effectiveness, offering courses to train project leaders in impact evaluation methodologies and providing direct technical assistance in designing evaluations.

In this context, an expert team from the IDB headquarters under the leadership of Paul Winters, a professor at American University, was invited by the IDB country office in Guyana to host the session.