An evaluation of the EU’s support to Private Sector Development (PSD) comes at a time when EuropeAid’s redefines its future private sector strategy. PSD is a key priority of the Agenda for Change, which provides direction for the EU’s new development policy. The conclusions of the evaluation were presented at a seminar in Brussels earlier this year.
“We also know that PSD is an area of concern within the international community,” said Martyn Pennington, Head of the Evaluation unit at EuropeAid. “It is important that our partner countries benefit not only from aid but from private sector flows, and that they themselves have a vibrant private sector, based on robust systems in their country which can make a real contribution to their development,” he said.
In 2010, EuropeAid’s Evaluations Unit commissioned a consortium of independent consultants, led by ADE (Analysis for Economic Decisions), to look at the effectiveness of EU support to PSD in all third countries from 2004 – 2010. At the same time, a separate evaluation took place on the EU’s trade related assistance.
The report showed that EU support led to a number of successes, particularly in the area of business environment, and for some elements of access to finance and support to enterprise competitiveness. The EU made valuable contributions in particular in middle-income countries, notably through policy dialogue, alignment with national strategies, and a focus on integration into the world economy.
EU aid demonstrated specific types of value-added. It related for example to providing its support and expertise in the context of trade negotiations. It further offered a wide range of instruments, with a critical mass of funding. This enabled it to cover the spectrum of different types of needs, from regulatory reforms to support to microenterprises.
Additionally, the report commended the fact that EU support to PSD falls within a larger framework of support that serves to build a partnership with the country. In other words, the EU doesn’t position itself as a donor providing a merely technical approach - it is more about building partnerships with beneficiary countries.
“There are still opportunities to grasp and improvements to be made,” said Edwin Clerckx, Team Leader for the evaluation. For example, the Commission’s expertise was not commensurate with the level of the support it provided. “There is more to be done in terms of capitalisation of knowledge and in terms of maximisation of the impact of the support that it is providing,” he said. The evaluation recommends, for example, better linkages between support for PSD and employment generation.
Philippe Loop, Head of Unit on PSD, Trade and Regional Integration at EuropeAid, accepted most findings and recommendations. “There are areas where we can improve our impact,” he said. “They refer to project preparation where, I think, a bit more research and study should be made prior to launching any operation. This is something we can accept, and we will certainly think about ways of how to improve this in future programming”.
Edwin Clerckx pointed out that evaluating global sector strategies at such a large scale is, inevitably, an intricate process. One important challenge is “the fact that the scope of this evaluation was extremely broad,” he said. “Given that scope, it is very difficult to come up with one single assessment on the success or not of the Commission support.” Clerckx and his team tackled this by defining a set of ten evaluation questions and by concentrating on issues and questions at the strategic level.
Megan Kennedy-Chouane of the OECD-DAC Network on Development Evaluation suggested that partner countries could benefit from evaluating their own PSD strategies. “That is where we see the gap,” she said.
A partner country could look at the role of different donors, EU or other, from within its own strategic evaluation of its PSD. Apart from being of value to a partner country, this information would be important to an external evaluation.
“I think that’s the future of evaluation and where it’s most interesting to look next,” she said.
This collaborative piece was drafted with input from Charles Raudot Geney de Chatenay, and Ylenia Rosso with support from the capacity4dev.eu Coordination Team.
Cover page illustration “Industrial Textile Factory”, copyright Lucian Coman, Dreamstime.com.
Log in with your EU Login account to post or comment on the platform.