Before exploring the process of monitoring and evaluating Managing for Development Results (MfDR), it’s helpful to stand back and remind ourselves of what MfDR means.
So, a little background: in February 2005 the OECD organised the Paris High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. At that meeting, more than 100 participants – including donor and developing country governments, multilateral donor agencies, regional development banks and international agencies – endorsed the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. The Declaration focuses on five mutually reinforcing principles including 1) ownership, 2) alignment, 3) harmonisation, 4) managing for results and 5) mutual accountability.
For each of these principles, participants signed up to agreed ‘commitments’:
Under MfDR, partner countries committed to:
1) strengthen the linkages between national and development strategies and annual and multi-annual budget processes.
2) endeavour to establish results-orientated reporting and assessment frameworks that monitor progress against key dimensions of the national and sector development strategies; and that these frameworks should track a manageable number of indicators for which data are cost-effectively available.
At the meeting, donors committed to:
1) Link country programming and resources to results and align them with effective partner country performance assessment frameworks, refraining from requesting the introduction of performance indicators that are not consistent with partners’ national development strategies.
2) Work with partner countries to rely, as far as possible, on partner countries’ results-orientated reporting and monitoring frameworks.
3) Harmonise their monitoring and reporting requirements and, until they can rely more extensively on partner countries’ statistical, monitoring and evaluation systems, [work] with partner countries to [the] maximum extent possible on joint formats for periodic reporting.
Partner countries and donors jointly commit to:
1) Work together in a participatory approach to strengthen country capacities and demand for results based management.
That’s all very well, but what does it all mean?
What, exactly, is MfDR? Well, lets use the Paris Declaration’s definition as a starting point: managing for results means managing and implementing aid in a way that focuses on the desired results and uses information to improve decision-making.
The easiest way to think about MfDR is to divide it into its component parts. Lets first ask the questions, “What is management?” and then ask about the results toward which that management should be working. Henri Fayol, a French mining engineer and management theorist in the early 20th century described management as a combination of seven activities: planning, organizing, leading, coordinating, controlling, staffing and motivating. It is possible to further group these activities into Human Resource Management, Operations Management, Financial Management etc. In short, however, management refers to the deliberate activity undertaken by the leadership of an organisation with a view to achieving stakeholder objectives.
The results that IHP signatories are working towards are both country and organisation specific. However, they should all contribute toward the Millennium Development Goals (three of which relate to health outcomes).
I hope that this blog entry has shed some light on the issue of MfDR. Please send thoughts and comments to greg@human-scale.net
