The evaluation of development policy and cooperation in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland is organised in two functions, the central development evaluation office (EVA-11) and the decentralised development evaluation performed by the different operational departments and embassies. The internal by-law on evaluations (norm 4/2011, attached here) guides both centralised and decentralised evaluations. The norm constitutes the evaluation policy of the Ministry and the mandate for EVA-11. It defines the position of evaluation and its role in the Ministry, the respective responsibilities of the centralised and decentralised evaluations, how work is planned, the evaluation process, including the management response and back-reporting systems, and the publicity and publication of the evaluation results. The Norm also describes participation in evaluation capacity development of partner countries, in collaboration with international evaluation communities.
EVA-11 is an independent entity attached to the office of the Under-Secretary of State for Development Policy and Cooperation. Its role is to manage wider evaluations, to participate in joint evaluations with others, to develop evaluation capacity, and to provide help-desk service within the Ministry. The centralised evaluations are of strategic significance and of comprehensive scope, such as theme-based evaluations, country programme evaluations, entire development instruments, and the like. EVA-11 has included external quality assurance experts within each evaluation team since late 2009 and executed anonymous peer reviews of all the centralised evaluation reports from 2010. The decentralised evaluations assess individual interventions and programmes. The development evaluation of Finland fulfils the OECD/DAC development evaluation principles.