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The African Development Bank Group (AfDB) undertakes self-evaluation of its non-sovereign operations (NSOs) through Expanded Supervision Reports (XSRs) produced by the designated Bank departments for projects that reach Early Operating Maturity. Independent Development Evaluation (IDEV) subsequently reviews a sample of these XSRs and produces an XSR Evaluation Note for each XSR reviewed, as well as a synthesis report for the period under study, in this case, 2014-2019. This report synthesizes findings from the validations of 46 of the 73 XSRs produced over the period, which represent 63% coverage by volume. The report assessed compliance with the Bank’s XSR process, the quality of the XSRs, the development outcome of Bank interventions, and the Bank’s investment profitability, work quality and additionality.
- Compliance with the Bank’s XSR Process: Over the past decade, the Bank has been successful in internalizing the process of undertaking XSRs and improving the quality of XSRs, but not the process of selecting projects for the XSR exercise. Monitoring for Early Operating Maturity by project type and self-evaluating all projects reaching operating maturity has not systematically taken place.
- Quality of XSRs: IDEV’s assessment rated 43 of the 46 XSRs (93.5%) Highly satisfactory or Satisfactory. Notwithstanding the overall positive rating for the quality of XSRs, areas of improvement remain in identifying and formulating lessons.
• Development outcome of Bank interventions: Overall, the operations reviewed resulted in a positive development outcome. The synthesis found that 34 of the 46 evaluated interventions realized positive results that, on balance, met or exceeded specified financial, economic, environmental, and social performance benchmarks and standards. Notwithstanding the overall positive rating, XSRs were not uniform in their reporting of quantifiable data on development outcomes of Bank interventions such as turnover, employment, exports, foreign exchange savings, gender profile, etc.
Lessons and Drivers of Success:
The main lessons and success drivers from the 2014-2019 XSRs are related to factors that appear to have a direct, causal effect on the intervention's success and its realization of its intended development outcome. They are suitable and valuable to the NSO portfolio as a whole. Some of them are as follows:
- Working with good sponsors is the most deterministic factor in overall project success.
- Good front-end work is instrumental to the assessment and achievement of targeted development results.
- Non-lending assistance is correlated with higher rates of project success.
Recommendations:
In view of the conclusions of the validations, IDEV suggested that the Bank should:
- Ensure that NSOs reaching early operating maturity are systematically self-evaluated.
- Do more to collect credible information on development results. This is more important in financial intermediary operations.
- Place more emphasis on reporting the outcomes of its Technical Assistance and advisory operations.
- Improve the quality of XSR preparation.
Evaluation Task Manager: Khaled Samir Hussein, Principal Evaluation Officer