The policy community has recently become increasingly attentive to the results of foreign assistance, including democracy assistance, and is looking to support approaches that have demonstrated their effectiveness. CIPE has been evaluating its democracy assistance programs for over two decades now, and completed a major evaluation study this year: the 25-Year Impact Evaluation. Through the 25-year evaluation, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, CIPE documented its successes, assessed the relative effectiveness of program approaches, and extracted lessons for future programming.
Key findings included strong performances among local partnerships, especially with local business associations, and among anti-corruption projects. Eurasia led all regions in high-impact projects, which reformed taxation, improved transparency, strengthened chambers of commerce, and improved the business environment for small and medium-sized enterprises. CIPE also recorded a notable number of high- or exceptional- impact projects in countries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, and Serbia.
What does it mean for CIPE’s programs to have an impact on democratic development? Democratization is a complex phenomenon, involving progress on multiple dimensions of value change, behavioral change, and institutional reform. We looked for evidence of program effects in the following areas related to CIPE’s objectives:
- Policy changes that advanced governance reforms and market-oriented solutions
- Expanded participation of economic constituencies in policymaking processes
- Enhanced capacity of private sector organizations to advocate for policy change
- Increased access to information
- Increased support among decision-makers for democratic, market systems
This systematic use of standardized impact criteria yielded numerous insights, which we are building into our coming strategy. At the same time, CIPE and its partners design each project cooperatively to meet local needs and conditions. This process necessitates a sensitivity in evaluation to the distinctive individual project objectives and characteristics. Thus, we’ll never identify a single best approach that is proven superior to the others; however, we are gathering powerful data that tell us whether we’re moving in the right direction, and we are finding the evaluation process to be essential to continuous learning.
Published Date: October 04, 2010