Learning from evaluation at the Millennium Challenge Corporation

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US foreign aid agency working with selected countries, emphasises rigorous evaluations to support poverty reduction through economic growth. MCC's experience with early impact evaluations and its growing evaluation portfolio has motivated actions to enhance the quality of evaluations. Specifically, MCC has introduced formal reviews that (i) better balance evaluation designs to ensure learning while respecting accountability, (ii) more selectively use impact evaluations and (iii) strengthen the programme logic and its documentation. MCC has also developed an explicit results dissemination strategy to ensure public access to evaluation results and most evaluation data, subject to ethical protections of respondents.