Lesson Learned

Evaluations should not hold the project accountable for outcomes that the project was not originally designed to address.

Evaluations should not hold the project accountable for outcomes that the project was not originally designed to address. As originally designed, the Rural Land Governance Project included a variety of strategies within the components to ensure the engagement, participation, and awareness of women, and towards the end of the Compact, additional efforts to engage women in the rural land possession certificates process were introduced, but the project did not have a central focus on specific outcomes for women. While several evaluation questions sought to assess whether the project had differing impacts on men and women for learning purposes, the report frames this as areas where the project did not succeed, thereby having the appearance of holding the project accountable to a different measure of success than originally conceived (MCC has since that time introduced a variety of policy measures to strengthen attention to gender in project design). This lesson extends beyond gender inequities to include areas of material inequalities: the evaluation noted significantly less concern among large landholders over tenure security than their comparison group; however, the project did not target large or smallholder farmers. Similarly, the evaluation identified a variety of responses regarding unintended consequences of the Government of Burkina Faso’s 2009 Rural Land Law, suggesting that these represent problems attributable to the project. MCC has addressed this lesson through the revised Monitoring and Evaluation Policy by having two standard evaluation questions to ensure that all evaluations are focused on assessing the corresponding project’s objective and project logic leading to said objective. This lesson can additionally be addressed in future evaluation reports by an evaluation report structure that clearly distinguishes findings related to the effectiveness of the project in achieving agreed objectives and outcomes from valuable additional learning that may emerge from the evaluation but for which the project may not have been fully designed to address.