Evaluability Assessments in Austrian development cooperation

Evaluability Assessments in Austrian development cooperation

Evaluability Assessments (EAs) aim at determining the overall quality of the design of an intervention, whether a programme, a project, a strategy, or a policy. They serve as a compass for subsequent evaluations by assessing readiness for evaluation. As such, they have the potential to both pave the way for a subsequent evaluation and to contribute to deepen evaluative thinking and foster the comprehensiveness and common understanding of an intervention being examined.

Evaluability Assessments are widely used within bi- and multilateral development cooperation, with various development actors having shaped unique modalities for their application and integrated them within their overall evaluation systems. Based on those experiences, many of these agencies have developed their own EA guidance documents to inform their further use of EAs, and these documents in turn have informed the development of this module. This module of the Austrian Development Agency aims to support and guide the efforts to assess the evaluability of interventions.