Chitra Achyut Deshpande

Chitra Achyut Deshpande

Senior Evaluation Officer
IFAD
Italy

My contributions

    • Dear Carlos,

      In IFAD’s Independent Office of Evaluation, we prepare every year a synthesis report based on a meta-analysis of project and country evaluations conducted in the previous year as well as independent evaluation ratings from 2002 to today. This Annual Report on Results and Impact of IFAD Operations (ARRI) aims to: i) report on results and impacts from IFAD operations, and to ii) identify lessons and systemic issues to be addressed in IFAD’s programmes.

      The ARRI allows management to engage with a comprehensive yet synthetic overview of the Organisation’s performance and achievements and to compare IFAD’s outcomes with those of other international financial institutions.

      To prepare the ARRI we conduct quantitative analyses on all final evaluations in the previous 10 years and qualitative analysis of evaluations conducted in the last year. All evaluations, their ratings and other data are included in the ARRI database, which is a building block of our knowledge management system.

      Through the meta-analyses of evaluations, themes that are important to IFAD’s performance emerge which the Executive Board requests the Evaluation Office to focus on. Therefore, each ARRI has a “learning theme” and in the case of 2018 this was the targeting of the rural poor, a very relevant means by which we can contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals.  Based on the latest ARRI recommendations, IFAD’s board confirmed our focus on the poorest in remote rural areas and reviews of our targeting methods at programme and project level are ongoing.

      ARRI is the flagship of our evaluation office and therefore attracts management attention. One lesson I can share from this years’ experience is that the importance of the learning theme (targeting of the rural poor) prompted us to adopt a more holistic approach to the development of the Report, by organising a Conference on Rural Inequalities which allowed to enhance the engagement and outreach of the learning on targeting the rural poor and addressing inequalities, beyond the scope of the ARRI itself.

      Chitra