The Future of Development Evaluation: Adapting to a Changing Landscape Dates: 2nd & 3rd of October 2023

Venue: Tent Hall - IsDBG Headquarters, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Background

Today’s world faces multiple intersecting crises, from the impact of the COVID-19 crisis to climate change, rising conflicts, and exacerbated social inequalities. These rising challenges often exacerbate existing development challenges, such as food insecurity, failing health infrastructure, and gender-based violence, in new and unanticipated ways. While every crisis brings unique challenges, lessons learned from past crisis responses can help inform future interventions and enhance the impact of these efforts. This makes the generation and use of evidence even more important in today’s world. Evaluation has a critical role to play in improving crisis responses by ensuring that available evidence is timely and relevant. However, for evaluation to rise to the needs of today, the practice of evaluation must learn from current challenges and embrace forward-looking, innovative, adaptation, and inclusive practices to stimulate transformation in a meaningful way. Part of this work is learning from the recent experiences of partner organizations, countries, and contexts where strategic planning mechanisms have efficiently aided pandemic management and recovery; another key aspect is leveraging innovative methods and technologies to enhance evidence generation from evaluation.

Symposium Objectives & Expected Outcomes

The theme of the 5^th Evaluation Symposium is “The Future of Development Evaluation: Adapting to a Changing Landscape”. The overall goal of this Symposium is to leverage future innovations in development evaluation that will contribute towards accelerating development effectiveness within institutions and at country levels. The Symposium will enable the dissemination of evidence-based best practices that promote development effectiveness and assimilation of innovations in key functions (data analytics, corporate performance, country strategy, operations efficiency, results management, etc.).

The specific objectives of the Symposium are as follows:

• Enhance the learning culture within the evaluation community and within the IsDB Group,
• Boost the quality and speed of the Realigned IsDB Strategy 2023 - 2025
• Support institutional readiness and governance oversight.
• Strengthen the IsDB Group’s external credibility.

The expected outcomes of the symposium are as follows:

• Creating conducive spaces for debates and enlightenment on evaluation.
• Advancing knowledge and understanding of what works, and what does not, in evaluation practices.
• Sharing insights on the future of innovation and adaptive evaluation
• Strengthening future operations design, delivery, and efficiency through incorporating best practices
• Sharing corporate-level knowledge to guide continuous improvements, organizational change, and learning
• Keeping abreast of the latest advancements in evaluation practices and ensuring their use in addressing the development challenges and opportunities presented by a rapidly changing world.
• Promoting collaboration via networking and collaboration among evaluation professionals other business units and key decision makers.

Expected Participants

The primary targeted audience is all IsDB Group staff, including those in regional hubs. Then, some in-depth technical sessions will target mainly staff working in self-monitoring, quality assurance, results measurement, and evaluation functions within IsDB Group. Evaluation practitioners from other peer MDBs will be also invited as well as Saudi-based partners.

DAY 1:  October 2nd, 2023: Subtheme: Evaluation Contribution towards Transforming IsDB Group into an Agile Learning Institution

09.30-10.00   Arrival of Guests and Participants at the Tent Hall

10.00-10.15   Welcome: Ahmed Ag Aboubacrine, Acting Director, Independent Evaluation Department (IEvD) Opening Remarks: Dr. Mansur Muhtar, Vice President, Operations (VPO)

DAY 2: October 3rd, 2023: Sub-Theme: Development Evaluation Journey of MDBs: From Past Achievements to Future Aspirations

09.30-10.00   Arrival of Guests and Participants at the Tent Hall