Costs of evaluation

Useful evaluations entail activities that apparently are not necessary to manage the logistics of a programme, and hence incur additional costs. Riecken has said, " ... my experience with evaluation is that there are few bargains, and usually you get no more than you pay for," and "When an evaluation is cheap and quick, it is often also not very good" (5). Without entering into this debate, we can nevertheless learn something from the actual levels of expenditure on evaluation. On the one hand, the World Bank review of monitoring and evaluation of projects in East Africa in 1979 for example, gives a figure of US $12.8 million for monitoring and evaluation of 28 projects averaging US $460,000 each, or somewhere around 0.5 to 5 per cent of total project costs (6). The US Government estimates that 1 per cent should be used to evaluate programs in health. On the other hand, Kielmann et al. consider that "... it should be neither uncommon nor unreasonable to budget 20 per cent to 40 per cent of total project costs for analysis of project-generated data and project evaluation" (7). Evidently, the scale of expenditure of the project itself has some influence on these calculations. Similarly, the purpose of the evaluation of the project is important - while relatively high expenditures may be essential for pilot or experimental projects, it seems unlikely that more than perhaps 5 per cent of project costs would be made available for routine evaluations of large-scale service projects. Such expenditures would often be sufficient to allow useful evaluation, if it is recognized that causality may not be established.

Ultimately, determining the percentage of programme expenditures spent on evaluation is a subjective judgement, as it depends upon which costs are assigned to the delivery of programme services and which to the distinct effort labelled evaluation. In fact, the best evaluation may appear to cost nothing, as it would be an integral component of programme design and implementation.