CGD senior fellow and program director Ruth Levine argues that independent impact evaluation of anti-corruption programs will be crucial to the success of the new World Bank campaign against corruption. As corruption-fighting programs are put into place, she writes, donor and recipient countries must request and fund careful, credible and independent third party evaluations.
Levine's recommendations include collecting information about starting conditions, rolling out programs so that sensible comparisons can be made, conducting rigorous evaluations and, when the results are in, publishing them regardless of whether or not they make the funders and implementers look good. By insisting on careful, independent evaluation of program impact from the outset, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and his colleagues could break with the decades-old World Bank tradition of doing without learning, she says. Levine is co-author of a forthcoming CGD working group report, When Will We Ever Learn? Improving Lives through Impact Evaluation.
