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Over the last 30 years, the effectiveness of official development assistance (ODA) has been widely and harshly criticized.Despite substantial investments in development assistance, many recipient countries, particularly in Africa, have little to show for the money.There was little sustainable development for the investment.This concern has resulted in considerable rethinking among governments and international organizations about how development assistance funds should be allocated.This rethinking has led to an extensive new emphasis on outcomes-oriented, results-based management of development assistance funding and a greater emphasis on the role and responsibility of recipient governments in planning and implementing development activities.It has also heightened interest in the evaluation of international cooperation in education.It is hard to argue with the logic of outcomes-oriented development assistance funding.Money should only continue to flow if both donors and recipient countries are clear about what the money is intended to accomplish and there is clear evidence that those intended ends are being achieved.This is accomplished through outcomes-oriented planning and assessed through results-based evaluations of project effectiveness.This underlying concept has been amplified through the initiation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and the Fast-Track Initiatives (FTI).Both of these funding mechanisms are based on the premise that development funds should be targeted to countries that are making the most efficient use of the money and actually are achieving development results.These countries are defined within the MDG and FTI as those which have enacted good policies and which have minimized corruption.To maintain support for ODA, those responsible for the allocations of international assistance funds need solid evidence about the effectiveness of alternative approaches, strategies, and activities.Yet ample evidence suggests that evaluation is often an after-thought, often under-funded, and often regarded as a threat to the funding agency rather than as an opportunity to improve practice.Reasons for resistance to rigorous evaluation of ODA vary, but include the tendency of some donors to allow project design be shaped by political considerations that are not fully compatible with technical merit, over-promising during the procurement process in ways that result in unreachable objective, unwillingness to invest in the data collection needed to address important evaluation questions, and sometimes the low technical merit of past evaluation efforts.There is sometimes a concern that program implementers' actions are being driven by a fixation on achieving predefined evaluation criteria rather than by a realistic appraisal of the actual conditions encountered in the field as implementation activities get underway.Then too, evaluation poses a risk.Donor officials may fear that clear evidence of
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