Workshop on Evaluation for Policymaking held in Suzhou
Workshop on Evaluation for Policymaking which is cosponsored by the Ministry of Finance of China and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and co-organized by the Asia-Pacific Finance and Development Center (AFDC) and the Asia-Pacific Community of Practice on Managing for Development Results (APCoP) is held from October 27-31 in Suzhou, China.
Dr. Li Kouqing, Director-General of AFDC, and Mr. Edgar Cua, Senior Advisor of East Asia Department of ADB attended the opening ceremony and delivered opening remarks respectively on behalf of the co-organizers of the workshop.
As Mr. Cua pointed out, the workshop topic is really important given constrained resources and results-oriented management. Demand for evaluation are growing in countries because of the increasing attention to ‘results’ and ‘evidence’ as critical for justifying expenditure and scaling up programmes or policies.
“However, despite the importance of evidences, problems hinder practice of evaluation, including methodology, capacity building, and resources, and there isn’t an overall strategy to feed the results of these evaluations into decision making at every level,” said Mr. Cua. “That is why the workshop is held with an aim to acquaint participants with a methodology on how evaluation can be used for better policymaking.”
According to Dr. Li of AFDC, in order to improve policymaking, we not only need to learn from the past, advocate learning by doing, but also should have clear vision and base our policymaking on solid evidence, that’s why the learning on M&E is important.
China puts great emphasis on the capacity building and establishment of performance evaluation system at all levels of government. “Last year, Chinese government issued a decision to comprehensively deepen reform. Recently, the newly amended budget law was passed at the congress. All these measures aim to build a modern governance system in China,” said Dr. Li.
The workshop attracted 40 participants from the Ministry of Finance as well as line ministries of eight countries in Central Asia and East Asia, including two deputy minister level officials from Tajikistan.
The workshop will discuss evaluation theory and methodology to understand program and/or policy impacts. It will also arrange a field trip to Lihu Lake Exhibition Center in Wuxi city, Jiangsu Province for participants to have a better understanding of how program impact can be evaluated for the purpose of delivering greater benefits for citizens and for better policymaking by governments.
