COMPLIANCE LEVEL OF THE UNITED STATES AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (USAID) EVALUATIONS WITH THE UNITED NATIONS STANDARDS "EVALUATING EVALUATIONS"

Date

2024-2

Author

TANGÜREK, HÜSEYİN ALİ ALİ

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This policy evaluation thesis aims to evaluate the quality of evaluations made by the USA Agency for International Development (USAID) of the financial assistance programs implemented in the Eurasian Region, which the USA Government Accountability Office closely monitors regarding efficiency and effectiveness. Evaluation standards set by the United Nations are used as the primary benchmark for the quality of evaluations. On the other hand, scholarly discussions on the nature and purpose of development assistance programs in general and in the context of Eurasia are also considered while evaluating the evaluations due to the complicated sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscape of and geostrategic rivalries in the region. I selected six performance evaluations conducted between 2016 and 2021 in USAID-funded programs in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. I used The United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) Global Evaluation Reports Oversight System (GEROS) and the quality assessment matrix designed in accordance with UN standards for case study evaluations, while for them I also used USAID's evaluation report compliance checklist to assess differences in evaluation results to determine how well USAID evaluation standards conformed to UN standards. I found that level of compliance of USAID's evaluations are satisfactorily high with the UN's standards while it is dramatically low with USAID's internal standards. Most of the findings indicated that the evaluations' reliability, validity, stakeholder involvement, ethical standards, and human rights aspects require improvements. These findings were in line with the scholarly literature on the nature, purpose, and methods of development assistance and evaluations.

Subject Keywords

(USAID) Evaluation, GEROS, Meta-evaluation, USAID, (UN) Standards

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/108509

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis