Article 11 of the agreement between FMO and the State of The Netherlands of November 16 1998 requires the agreement to be evaluated every five years. Previous evaluations focused on the financial continuity and the level of cooperation between the State and FMO (2004) or on the effectiveness of established governance mechanisms and the development impact of FMO’s operations (2008/9). The present evaluation - covering the period 2008-2012 - focuses on whether the institutional set up of FMO as an institute is geared for generating development results, taking into account the fast changing environment and the balance between financial and development results.
The evaluation focused on 3 main questions:
1. How does FMO combine its own financial sustainability with the development objectives?
2. Is FMO’s institutional set up, including procedures, sufficient to demonstrate its contribution to economic and social development in the countries where FMO is active?
3. What can be concluded, using FMO’s information system and interviews, about the development results for the years 2008-2012?
To obtain a good understanding of the performance of FMO with respect to these questions, Carnegie Consult and ODI carried out a benchmarking exercise among three other large European development finance institutions (DFIs): die Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft (DEG) Germany and CDC Group UK and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). In the benchmark, special attention was paid to the systems and procedures these institutions have in place for measuring, monitoring and evaluating development results and how these relate to the defined goals.
