World Bank

The World Bank's mission is to fight poverty and improve the living standards of people in the developing world. It is a development bank that provides loans, policy advice, technical assistance, and knowledge-sharing services to low and middle income countries to reduce poverty. In 2003, the World Bank provided $18.5 billion and worked in more than 100 developing countries, which provided support for education, health, debt relief, biodiversity, infrastructure (such as water, transportation, power), and conflict resolution.

The Operations Evaluation Department is an independent unit within the World Bank that was created in 1970 by then World Bank President Robert McNamara. The unit reports directly to the bank's Board of Executive Directors, assessing what works and what does not, how a borrower plans to run and maintain a project, and the lasting contribution of the bank to a country's overall development. The goals of this department's evaluations are to learn from experience, to provide an objective basis for assessing the results of the bank's work, and to provide accountability in the achievement of its objectives. As with many large funding agencies, this internal evaluation examines both programs of funding (for the World Bank, this means looking at assistance programs at the country level) and particular funded projects. The department's evaluation tools are project reviews, country assistance evaluations, sector and thematic reviews, and process reviews.

Agencies such as the World Bank have a substantial presence throughout the developing world, and therefore their strategies for evaluation have had substantial influence on not only their primary mission but on the nature of evaluation in those same countries.