A review of Norwegian evaluations
The Norad strategy announces the decision to prepare an annual report on the results of Norwegian foreign aid, a report that is due in late November 2007. "Aid yields results, but we know too little about how it works and the magnitude of the impacts". This lack of knowledge is experienced despite the fact that there has been a range of evaluations of different aid projects and programs during the last 20-30 years. The problem stems from the inherently difficult empirical issue of ascribing cause to effects in studies of human society, and from the fact that the ambitions on behalf of aid have increased in recent years.
The aim of this project is to therefore to assess recent Norwegian evaluations on the basis of how they apply accepted standards for impact evaluation, and how they establish causal effects in the analyses, and to use this assessment to provide guidelines for practical evaluations of aid projects.
