The ‘results agenda’ of donor agencies have inspired several heated debates. Value for money is one of the main tools that helps further this agenda.
There is significant pressure on donor development agencies to ‘demonstrate’ what they have achieved, and further, examine whether these results have been achieved in a cost-effective manner (‘value for money’).
This pressure to demonstrate ‘value for money’ often leads to plenty of frustration, as those designing and implementing aid programmes struggle to strike a balance between what is easy to prove versus the complex nature of an intervention designed to tackle a real-world problem.
There are several problems with the results agenda – development interventions take place in a wide range of contexts, that lend themselves to comparisons on some counts and not, on others. These contexts change every day, and certainly over the lifetime of a development project. — blog.wb.org/blogs
A version of this article appears in print on April 13, 2018 of The Himalayan Times.