Streamline the number of evaluation questions to produce more focused evaluation reports. The evaluation of the Liberia Energy Project answered over a dozen questions across four different domains, which required a significant amount of data collection and analysis. This resulted in a rich, but dense report that covered numerous topics. Without the grounding of a well-defined project objective that describes project success, the evaluation spoke to various aspects of potential success; this somewhat weakened the accountability function of the study. While accountability is not the sole purpose of an evaluation and can be defined in different ways, it is not clear whether MCC and partners needed a report of this breadth to learn for future investments. Long lists of evaluation questions, particularly in the absence of a clear final result of the project, often lead to evaluation reports presenting many results on equal footing and make it harder for the reader to understand whether the investment “worked” as intended. The Libera Energy evaluation, among others, informed adjustments to MCC’s Evaluation Management Guidance to require evaluations to answer two core summative questions.
Lesson Learned