External Evaluation of CGAP’s Work to Advance Financial Inclusion

Next week, at our Annual Meeting in Amsterdam, CGAP will finalize and formally adopt a new strategic direction for the next five years. To help us put together this strategy, we commissioned an independent evaluation of our previous years’ work. This evaluation provided important affirmations of what CGAP does well and pointers on what we can do better.

Summarizing the review, the lead evaluator gave CGAP high marks and said that it was in the “top decile of programs [she] had ever evaluated.” The written evaluation report concluded that CGAP played an important role in demonstrating the potential for new technologies and approaches to serve the poor and help them move out of poverty. It credited CGAP with influencing the behaviors and actions of policy makers at the global and national level as well as advising policies and practices of many financial services providers according to what CGAP has been learning globally.

From a “how-to” perspective, the evaluation said that CGAP has been very effective in creating and sharing practically relevant knowledge to advance financial access. In a survey that was part of the evaluation, 98% of members agreed or strongly agreed that CGAP was a leading source of information related to advancing financial access for the poor.

Separately, the Center for Global Development recently published a meta-assessment of external evaluations for a number of Global Partnership Programs. It included CGAP in the line-up even though it is different in nature and vastly smaller given its market development mandate compared to some of the other Global Partnerships covered, which literally disburse billions in direct grants to health and education. I’m obviously biased and may suffer from what behavioral economists would call the “Ikea Effect” (i.e., the tendency to subjectively overvalue the beauty of the self-assembled, yet objectively pretty crooked piece of furniture), but I interpreted that the CGD report gave CGAP the highest marks for its effective governance, technical soundness, and demonstrated value-added over and above what CGAP’s member Development Institutions would have accomplished on their own in the field.

Make no mistake, our recent evaluation also pointed out what CGAP could do better.  Most important, in the context of a broader responsible market development, is the need for CGAP to work harder at sharpening our focus and using our explicit leverage. In our draft strategy for the next five years, we made a real effort to articulate the core areas in which we strive to have impact, the desired market development outcomes that we hope to achieve, and the engagement models that we would pursue. By definition, for successful market development there can’t be single source attribution. But CGAP owes it to its members who are committing scarce resources to clearly articulate ex ante impact objectives and to continuously assess progress and contribution as we move forward, adjusting efforts as needed.

------- The author is the CEO of CGAP.