Why Evaluate? 


What is Evaluated?


Major Evaluations

IEG Major Evaluations are mainly aligned with World Bank Group priorities. The two main objectives of IEG major evaluations are:

1. Deepen evidence about the results of WBG programs and activities and their contribution to the World Bank Group’s strategic priorities and ultimately its twin goals.
2. Generate evidence on operational choices to enable mid-course corrections and promote a stronger internal culture for results, accountability, and learning.

Over the past five years IEG has increasingly moved to a strategic selection process for its major evaluations to ensure greater influence of each individual evaluation, and of all of them collectively.


Meso Evaluations

To address smaller, more focused, just-in-time evaluation issues, IEG undertakes meso evaluations. These evaluations were introduced in FY18, and have a strong focus on learning and a nimble processing protocol to maximize responsiveness and value added for the World Bank Group. Meso evaluations focus on distilling and sharing with World Bank Group management evaluative findings and lessons on well-defined specific topics from past work, and include additional focused work to deepen analysis and insight. Typically, IEG does no more than three meso evaluations per year.

Country and Project-level Evaluations

  • Country Learning Strategy Reviews: These reviews of past strategies feed into new country strategies.
  • Project-Completion Report Validations: These are desk-based exercises to validate World Bank Implementation Completion Reports (ICRRs).

Other Evaluation Products

  • Results and Performance of the World Bank Group (RAP): This report is prepared annually to provide a comprehensive assessment of the World Bank Group’s development effectiveness, drawing on project portfolio data. The report also looks at the WBG’s performance in a specific thematic area, such as gender (in FY15), the Millennium Development Goals (in FY14), Gender Equality (in FY16),  Managing for Results (in FY17).