Community of Evaluators Pakistan (COEP) focuses on institutionalization of the results chain in the development process through different initiatives including training and capacity building of the national public & private organizations, corporates, communities and NGOs in collaboration with national and international partners, donors and organizations. The aim is to improve governance and transparency to ensure delivery of output/goods to the target group. The main thrust is to improve socio-economic status and enhancing their productive capacities and income generation resources.

With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability, transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results for sustainable socio-economic & socio-cultural developments. Governments, parliaments, citizen forums, private sector, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society, international organizations, and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performances of the financial inputs for results and also require feedback systems embodied through a strong M&E mechanism.

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a powerful public management tool used to improve the way government and other organizations aspire to achieve results. There has been an evolution in the field of monitoring and evaluation moving away from traditional implementation based approaches to the results-based approaches. The Result Based M&E System (RBM&E) takes decision makers one step further in assessing whether and how goals are being achieved over time.

The development interventions are conceptualized if appropriately linked to result chain at the end. However, the result chains as envisaged in the project documents mostly remain mismatched with the outputs & outcomes because of non-integration of effective monitoring and evaluation mechanism due to absence of effective institutional arrangements. Weak commitment to the monitoring & evaluation functions has, always, caused poor results & outcomes which have rarely been documented.

There is a resurgence of demand for evaluation by policy makers and planners, but the capacity of the public sector evaluation institutions to meet this demand has declined for lack of investment in capacity building but no credible alternatives, to these public sector / private institutions and NGOs, have emerged in response to the increased demand. There is need for having a strategy for evaluation capacity building aimed at improving the development of evaluation capacity both on demand and supply sides for mainstreaming and sustaining the culture of “learning from experience”.