The Future of Development Evaluation: Adapting to a Changing Landscape Dates: 2nd & 3rd of October 2023
The Islamic Development Bank Group (IsDB Group) is pleased to announce the 5th IsDB Group Evaluation Symposium 2023 to be held in person on 02-03 October 2023 at the Tent Hall, IsDB headquarters – Jeddah.
Background
Today’s world faces multiple intersecting crises, from the impact of the COVID-19 crisis to climate change, rising conflicts, and exacerbated social inequalities. These rising challenges often exacerbate existing development challenges, such as food insecurity, failing health infrastructure, and gender-based violence, in new and unanticipated ways. While every crisis brings unique challenges, lessons learned from past crisis responses can help inform future interventions and enhance the impact of these efforts. This makes the generation and use of evidence even more important in today’s world. Evaluation has a critical role to play in improving crisis responses by ensuring that available evidence is timely and relevant. However, for evaluation to rise to the needs of today, the practice of evaluation must learn from current challenges and embrace forward-looking, innovative, adaptation, and inclusive practices to stimulate transformation in a meaningful way. Part of this work is learning from the recent experiences of partner organizations, countries, and contexts where strategic planning mechanisms have efficiently aided pandemic management and recovery; another key aspect is leveraging innovative methods and technologies to enhance evidence generation from evaluation.
Symposium Objectives & Expected Outcomes
The theme of the 5th Evaluation Symposium is “The Future of Development Evaluation: Adapting to a Changing Landscape”. The overall goal of this Symposium is to leverage future innovations in development evaluation that will contribute towards accelerating development effectiveness within institutions and at country levels. The Symposium will enable the dissemination of evidence-based best practices that promote development effectiveness and assimilation of innovations in key functions (data analytics, corporate performance, country strategy, operations efficiency, results management, etc.).
The specific objectives of the Symposium are as follows:
Enhance the learning culture within the evaluation community and within the IsDB Group,
Boost the quality and speed of the Realigned IsDB Strategy 2023 - 2025
Support institutional readiness and governance oversight.
Strengthen the IsDB Group’s external credibility.
The expected outcomes of the symposium are as follows:
Creating conducive spaces for debates and enlightenment on evaluation.
Advancing knowledge and understanding of what works, and what does not, in evaluation practices.
Sharing insights on the future of innovation and adaptive evaluation
Strengthening future operations design, delivery, and efficiency through incorporating best practices
Sharing corporate-level knowledge to guide continuous improvements, organizational change, and learning
Keeping abreast of the latest advancements in evaluation practices and ensuring their use in addressing the development challenges and opportunities presented by a rapidly changing world.
Promoting collaboration via networking and collaboration among evaluation professionals other business units and key decision makers.
Expected Participants
The primary targeted audience is all IsDB Group staff, including those in regional hubs. Then, some in-depth technical sessions will target mainly staff working in self-monitoring, quality assurance, results measurement, and evaluation functions within IsDB Group. Evaluation practitioners from other peer MDBs will be also invited as well as Saudi-based partners.
The Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) Operations Evaluation Department (OED), in close collaboration with the evaluation functions of the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD), and the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation (ITFC), organized the 2022 IsDB Group Evaluation Symposium under the theme "Evaluation Through the Lens of Recovery" from 29 to 30 March virtually and in person on March 31st at the Tent Hall in IsDB headquarters. The main objectives of the symposium consisted in shedding light on promoting evaluative thinking to enhance development interventions, informing decision-making processes, and more notably, leveraging partnerships to accelerate recovery in the context of the post global pandemic.
Evidence from Monitoring and Evaluation will be a powerful compass for the future to shape well-targeted public policies, correct course and ultimately deliver better outcomes. Thus, reshaping evaluation through stronger M&E capacities and systems is instrumental for charting a path to national development goals, effective crisis response, and sustainable recovery. To this end, it will require sustained efforts, at scale, across the world. Doing this as quickly as possible can only be achieved through collaboration and cooperation amongst a wide range of actors.
The symposium brought together prominent speakers from the multilateral development banks (MDBs), King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center, the Saudi Fund for Development, the Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results from Anglophone Africa and South Asia, the Global Evaluation Initiative, and academia. The event was well received as it provided a forum for evaluation practitioners from Saudi based institutions to emphasize the apparent shift in the dialogue on the role organizations can play in making the world a better, more sustainable place.
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