Evaluation and monitoring planning with four government departments in the Philippines

Decision-maker’s challenge

Citizens want to know that their tax dollars are being used well. Often, however, public agencies lack measurement capabilities, and the effectiveness of large public programs can be challenging to estimate. In the Philippines, the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) is working to improve evaluation practices and cultivate stronger systems of evidence-based decision-making in government programs. They are seeking to systematically produce evidence to inform decision-making, and to ensure that departments have the capacity to plan and execute evaluations.

Impact opportunity

Working closely with executive departments, NEDA is the agency in charge of coordinating and supporting all activity related to the Philippine Development Plan (PDP). The executive departments, which span all major sectors from health to trade, are responsible for developing policies and delivering programs that affect millions of Filipinos. Currently, they are intensifying efforts to measure results and integrate monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in program design and implementation. The goal? To make more informed decisions and develop more effective programs to help them achieve better social and economic outcomes for Filipinos.

Our approach

IDinsight worked with NEDA and four departments — Departments of Health (DOH), Agriculture (DA), Transportation (DOTr), and Trade and Industry (DTI) — to prioritize programs for evaluation, develop robust theories of change, identify evidence needs, and conduct evaluability assessments. For each department, IDinsight engaged government teams to develop learning and evaluation roadmaps centered on priority research questions. Concurrently, IDinsight conducted skill-building working sessions with the departments. By the end of the project, we synthesized lessons from the entire engagement to deliver feedback on NEDA’s National Evaluation Policy Framework.

The results

• The Dept. of Agriculture (DA) decided to use our program prioritization criteria to identify the programs that they should evaluate.
• The DA also included one of IDinsight’s recommended process evaluations for its flagship, farmer-to-consumer agribusiness, and marketing program in the proposed 2022 budget for the department.
• The Department of Health (DOH) is planning to use the roadmap we developed as the basis for the required upcoming evaluation of the Universal Health Care rollout.
• DOH is contacting international development agencies seeking additional external funding for the research described in our roadmap for their Telemedicine program
• The Department of Transportation (DOTr) is interested in pursuing our proposed monitoring activity for their regional airport, and is seeking funding from UNDP, NEDA & other partners.