The African Development Bank Group (“AfDB” or “the Bank”) has acknowledged the importance of partnerships for promoting development effectiveness, and has formulated its partnership goals and objectives in its Ten-Year Strategy (TYS, 2013-2022) as follows: to become a catalyst for development finance, a trusted adviser and a credible knowledge broker. In this context and considering the central contribution of partnering to the success of the Bank, Independent Development Evaluation (IDEV) is currently conducting an evaluation that aims to facilitate learning by providing evidence-based knowledge on the performance of the AfDB’s partnerships.
Two broad partnership categories can be distinguished for the Bank, those of primarily finance-oriented partnerships and non-finance-oriented partnerships. These partnerships arrangements could be operating within or outside of specific investment programs or projects, and they could be lending or non-lending oriented. The Bank is currently involved in 89 partnerships sub-divided into 24 Cofinancing agreements, 46 Trust Funds, 15 Cooperation and Coordination partnerships, and 4 Knowledge, Advisory Services and Policy dialogue partnerships.
By examining both sovereign and non-sovereign operations borne out of the Bank’s various partnership arrangements, this evaluation is a comprehensive exercise to shed light on the overall performance of the partnership ecosystem at the Bank. Specifically, it intends to:
- provide an assessment of the effectiveness and efficiency of the various partnership initiatives at the AfDB.
- identify the factors affecting the performance of partnerships and the conditions under which they could achieve better results.
- provide the Board and the Bank's Management with lessons and recommendations towards improving the effectiveness of the present and future partnerships.
The evaluation will be structured in three thematic components: (i) financing partnerships, (ii) non-financing partnerships, and (iii) loan syndication. It will cover institutional financial and non-financial partnerships initiated at the Bank between 2008 and 2018. Additional themes will include coordination at country level and the convening power of the Bank. A review of the internal capacity and readiness of the Bank to partner with others in the context of the new Development and Business Delivery Model (DBDM) will also be conducted.
The evaluation adopts a utilization-focused approach, which will seek to respond to specific questions aligned with the needs of the primary users, with the intent of ensuring optimal use of the evaluation findings to inform the Bank’s decision-making process and improve performance. .
To generate a strong analysis of the strategic and operational perspectives of partnerships at the Bank, mixed evaluation methods will be applied including a literature review, portfolio analysis of operations, project reviews, case studies to offer in-depth assessment, benchmarking and Value for Money (VfM) analysis to assess generated results and benefits.
The evaluation team is led by Oswald Agbadome, Principal Evaluation Officer, and includes Eustace Uzor and Boubacar Ly, Evaluation Officers, and Jeannot Ngoulma, Junior Consultant.
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 Final_Approach Paper_Revised_01_05_2019.pdf | 1.27 MB |