Year: 2021 | Topic: Local development and local governance

Description

The programme is a five-year programme that started in 2017 and ran until 2021. The programme was supported by the federal Belgian government through the Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD).

The programme aims to contribute to good local governance through administrative capacity building in the South and local policy coherence in Flanders. This objective comprises two parts. On the one hand, the programme wants to increase the administrative capacity of local governments and their associations of cities and municipalities in the South through a process of capacity building around specific policy themes. On the other hand, the programme aims to contribute to the realisation of the SDGs in Belgium through their municipal translation into locally coherent sustainable development policies.

Result

On the one hand, the final evaluation served to account to the DGD subsidising authority for the results achieved by the programme and the proper use of funds. For local governments, the final evaluation also served to account for municipal international cooperation to politicians, civil society and civil servants.

On the other hand, there was also a learning aspect linked to the final evaluation. Although the future DGD multi-year programme was already submitted before the final evaluation report was delivered, the VVSG wanted to include its results in the operationalisation of the new multi-year programme (2022-2026). Unlike the programme under evaluation, the new multi-annual programme positions itself in a thematic CSF, namely "Sustainable cities", demonstrating the increased attention and recognition of the role of local governments in contributing to sustainable development.

To this end, the evaluation paid explicit attention to the OECD-DAC criteria (impact, effectiveness, relevance, sustainability, efficiency). Furthermore, for the South programme, it was intended to focus additionally on the town-twinning partnership strategy, the overall management of the grant programme by the VVSG and gender as a cross-cutting theme.