Efficiency in German Development Cooperation. Meta-evaluation and Evaluation Synthesis

Abstract

Public development finance should be economical. In development cooperation, the success of interventions is assessed largely using the instrument of evaluation. This meta-evaluation and evaluation synthesis assess the quality of project evaluations carried out by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the KfW Development Bank (KfW), as well as their findings on the economic efficiency of their interventions. The vast majority of interventions are rated as efficient by the project evaluations. However, only a small portion of this success can be explained based on the intervention characteristics and their development context. Instead, there are unintended associations between the ratings and the characteristics of the evaluations.