Hesham Shafick, Partner & Programme Director, Synerjies Center for International and Strategic Studies

“It is noteworthy that the number of local researchers authoring IEs outside of Iran drops significantly and represents a minority of IEs for half of the countries from the MENA region. This underscores the region's reliance on external expertise in conducting research endeavors with high technical demands, but also contributes to its perpetuation by hindering the growth of local capacities in the field of IE.

However, this represents only a fraction of the issue. The most crucial element of this imbalance, I contend, lies in its role in distorting local priorities by placing the ultimate authority on evaluating program performance in the hands of external experts. Typically, both local and external program designers and implementers heavily depend on evaluation reports to guide their corrective actions, subsequent iterations, and future strategies. As a result, the geographical concentration of powerful IE institutions indirectly contributes to the concentration of power on program priorities and performance indicators.

Originating institutionally and culturally from distant contexts, evaluation documents incrementally draw attention to both issues and measurements that may not necessarily align with the priorities and perspectives of the local context. This distortion not only affects the contextual relevance of corrective interventions but also influences the narrative and logic of implemented development programs writ large, as it creates an incentive to tailor both pre-planned and reported performance indicators to the preferences of external evaluators.

Most troubling is the compounding effect of such an externalization of IE activities. The sway of these external subjectivities not only perpetuates dependence on external evaluators but also tilts the evaluation agenda toward priority areas, performance indicators and other facets of impact evaluation in which external expertise is considered more relevant. This, in turn, intensifies the trend of channeling most IE assignments to non-MENA institutions, a practice which constrains the growth potential of local and regional institutions and hence reinforces the cyclical self-perpetuating nature of the situation criticized.

The influence of this regional imbalance extends beyond shaping the priorities of programs subjected to evaluation; it also affects the selection of which programs are evaluated and which are not. The emphasis on the health sector (trend 2) attests to this. The sector constitutes no more  than 5.5% of the Egyptian government’s total spending and 4.37% of the Egyptian GDP, yet accounts for 57% of IEs from Egypt. If the percentage from government spending indicates political priority and the percentage from GDP indicates societal/economic priority, then neither in both cases comes close to the priority given to the sector by evaluation institutions.

My argument does not insinuate a deliberate plot to manipulate impact evaluation in favor of external stakeholders. Instead, it underscores an unintended outcome resulting from the concentration of IE activities in non-local, primarily western, settings. This implication arises from the fact that evaluators are humans inherently shaped by their own contexts, priorities, frameworks, and subjectivities.

One solution to the problem indicated would be intensifying the focus on capacity development of researchers in the region. But without a sustainable stream of opportunities for these researchers to utilize these capacities, test them out in the real world and create careers out of them, these capacity sharing measures would not only go waste, but could even be yet another west-emigrating budget item on the local IE consultants’ balance sheets."