Abstract: |
There has been a growing consensus in the national and international aid
architecture that sporadic or scattered aid modality should be avoided. This
study conducted a comprehensive cluster evaluation on Korea's agricultural ODA
to Rwanda between 2013 and 2017, with two newly devised indexes: Cluster
Performance Index (CPI) and Resource Allocation Index (RAI). Every Korean
agricultural ODA project was categorized into five clusters and numerically
evaluated against criteria widely used in the evaluation of development
projects: relevance, efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability. Our cluster
evaluation reveals that projects are mostly planned appropriately, but in some
clusters, large amounts of the budget have been invested in poorly planned
projects. Regarding efficiency, there was considerable room for improvement in
all clusters. Particularly, in the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) category,
all clusters scored below average. Concerning performance evaluation, all
clusters scored relatively high in effectiveness, specifically in goal
achievement. Lastly, in terms of sustainability, risk management was found to
be relatively inadequate in all clusters. Based on the lessons from the
aforementioned observations and analysis results, this study suggests ODA
quality can be improved by optimizing budget allocation, improving monitoring
efficiency, creating synergistic effects through cluster linkage, and
developing agricultural value chain program. |