Annual Evaluation Reviews

ONGOING EVALUATION. The Annual Evaluation Review (AER) provides the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Board, Management, and other stakeholders with an independent, high-level perspective on development effectiveness based on findings and evidence from the Independent Evaluation Department’s (IED) evaluations and validations of ADB’s self-evaluation reports.

The 2023 Annual Evaluation Review (AER) provides a summary of the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) development effectiveness based on findings and evidence from Independent Evaluation Department’s (IED) work.

The rapid spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in 2020, the largest pandemic in more than a century, triggered severe public health and economic crises across the world including in Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) member countries. Over the course of the year, ADB’s dominant operations focused on crisis response, supporting its member countries contain the spread of the disease and protect the vulnerable. Against this backdrop, this Annual Evaluation Review (AER) updates ADB’s performance and results from a high-level perspective, based on findings and evidence from Independent Evaluation Department (IED) evaluations and validations, and assesses ADB’s institutional response and support for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how the pandemic may affect them.

The Annual Evaluation Review (AER) is the flagship report of the Independent Evaluation Department (IED) on the operational performance and results of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). This is an important year for the AER as it marks the first full year of Strategy 2030’s implementation. The AER provides a synthesis of the evaluations prepared by IED in the preceding year, updates performance trends, and draws lessons and offers recommendations to guide ongoing and future operations. The AER’s assessments are based on IED validations of all project completion reports for sovereign operations and extended annual review reports for nonsovereign operations and all direct IED project evaluations.

The 2019 Annual Evaluation Review (AER) comes in the midst of two important tasks following the approval of Strategy 2030 in 2018: the preparation of a new corporate results framework for the first half of Strategy 2030’s 12-year implementation period (2019–2024), and the formulation of the seven key operational priority plans (2019–2030). Strategy 2030 represents an important milestone and has created great expectations, but the new strategic goals and directions that it sets out still need to be properly operationalized.

The 2018 Annual Evaluation Review (AER) adds new perspectives to the development effectiveness discussion in two areas. First, it introduces a new section on ADB’s development results by distilling key findings from its high-level evaluations to analyze changes that have taken place due to ADB’s interventions, particularly achievements in the institution’s strategic agendas, drivers of growth, and country programs. Focusing on the delivery of results elevates the development effectiveness discussion to a higher plane, complementing the traditional discussion on ADB’s operational performance. In this respect, Independent Evaluation acknowledges ADB’s successes in promoting environmentally sustainable growth, regional cooperation and integration, and gender mainstreaming.

The 2017 Annual Evaluation Review (AER) comes at an important juncture for ADB, as it strengthens its position as a knowledge bank and learning institution. The work on the 2017 AER was undertaken as ADB was readying Strategy 2030, its long-term corporate framework. The AER provides an independent perspective of ADB’s performance based on the systematic assessment of ADB strategies, sectors, and operations. It informs on whether ADB’s initiatives made a difference in addressing the pressing development challenges in Asia and the Pacific. The AER does this primarily through analyses of evaluations of country strategies and projects.

The report assesses the performance of ADB operations based on findings of recent evaluations, and draws out the priorities for ADB in coming years. It also reviews the institution’s efforts to achieve environmentally sustainable growth and to implement evaluation recommendations.

This report examines ADB’s operational performance in 2014 and follow-up to evaluation recommendations. This report focuses on urban water supply and sanitation operations in a series of sustainability analysis.