Established in 1991, the Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) is an organisation which falls under the Ministry of Education. It administers scholarship and exchange programmes and is responsible for implementing nearly all EU education, training, culture and youth programmes at the national level with a view to furthering the internationalisation of Finnish educational and training institutions. It also promotes
Over the period 2004–2006 CIMO administered the North-South Higher Education Network Programme on behalf of the MFA which made available EUR 2 542 000 for that purpose. Its objective was to establish durable networks between Finnish higher education institutions and counterparts in developing countries with a view to promoting the economic and social development of the latter. The evaluation undertaken in 2006 concluded that, notwithstanding some scope for administrative improvement, the programme had been largely successful in promoting exchanges of students and teaching staff, and in improving curricula (Mikkola & Snellman 2006). However, the sustainability of the initial partnerships that were forged was questioned.
Building on the positive experiences of the pilot phase (2004–2006), a successor programme was launched: North-South-South Higher Education Institution Network Programme (2007–2009). This network programme provides new opportunities for partnerships between higher education institutions in Finland and their counterparts in developing countries. Its normative underpinnings are the Millennium Development Goals and Finnish development cooperation policies with regard to institution-building.
Its focus is the enhancement of higher education in partner countries. The programme seeks to enhance human capacity in all participating countries through interaction and mobility by means of three components:
• Reciprocal student and teacher exchange;
• Joint intensive courses at the partner institutions in the South;
• Networking between Finnish and partner institutions, preparatory and administrative visits as well as joint network meetings.
The overall programme budget for 2007–2009 is EUR 4.5 million, funded by the MFA. Two-thirds are channelled into student and teacher mobility, 10% into intensive courses and the remainder into networking activities and programme management.
Finnish universities and polytechnics and higher education institutions from sub-Sa-haran African countries plus Egypt, Nicaragua, Peru, Nepal and Vietnam are eligible for participation in the programme.
4.4.2 Institutional Cooperation Instrument (ICI)
Complementary to the exchange programme under CIMO, the MFA established in 2008 on a pilot basis an instrument for institutional North-South collaboration: the Institutional Cooperation Instrument (ICI) (Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland 2006b). Its objective is to strengthen the capacity of public sector institutions in partner countries by drawing on the expertise of comparable institutions in the Finnish public sector. The underlying premise is that the capacity of a public sector organisation is best augmented with the help of civil servants from a counterpart organisation with similar tasks and responsibilities. ICI provides an easy-to-use facility for institutional cooperation towards that end. It can be used to finance a variety of capacity development activities that are accepted as ODA. The main requirement is that the cooperation is
demanded by partner organisations that must show evidence of strong ownership to a results-orientated cooperation with well-defined, measurable objectives.
ICI is driven by the initiatives, demands and identified needs for capacity building in partner country agencies. Capacity-building activities may be geared to improving service delivery, developing new services or forms of service delivery, organisational development, revision of working procedures, increasing know-how and skills, networking and internationalisation.
Cooperation projects should be of at least of one year’s duration and with a budget in the range of EUR 50 000–500 000. Single, one-off conferences or seminars may not be financed. Only in exceptional cases may the budget exceed EUR 500 000 if well justified. Finland’s current or previous main cooperation countries (Vietnam, Nepal, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zambia, Nicaragua, Egypt, Namibia, and Peru) are given priority.
The eligible organisations in Finland are restricted to state agencies. Profit-making Finnish public organisations are excluded from taking part. In partner countries eligible institutions include public sector agencies, including publicly owned (majority-share) companies (para-statals) and research institutions. Associations, foundations and networks are not eligible.
New Finnish legislation governing the university sector is in progress. It is expected that as from January 2010 the universities will no longer be government institutions and hence not eligible under the ICI facility. From the point of view of North-South development research collaboration this presents a major problem. Admittedly, a substantial share of research in Finland takes place in state sector research institutes but the university sector still plays a key role in research innovation and researcher training. If the universities are excluded from the instrument, this will be a major blow to North-South research collaboration. We understand, however, that negotiations are currently in progress between the MFA and UniPID with a view to finding a solution to the problem.
4.4.3 Observations and Recommendations
The 2006 evaluation of CIMO covered a very short period and, although it was generally positive, it would be premature to draw any firm conclusions about effectiveness, efficiency and long-term impact as far as sustainable partnerships are concerned. In fact, the evaluation does point to the challenges of sustainability and calls for a long-term funding arrangement to be established.
The CIMO programmes cover only exchange of students and teaching staff. While it may not be justified to suggest the prolongation of student stays, there would certainly
with their counterparts on a more solid footing. In terms of institution-building – which is the express purpose of the programmes – short-term visits are hardly adequate.
It should also be noted that these programmes administered by CIMO for the MFA do not encourage research. To assist in the building of academic institutions, teaching and research must go hand in hand. They are complementary activities. The 2006 evaluation hinted at the possibility of expanding the future scope of the programme to include research cooperation. We strongly concur with that suggestion.
It is commendable that the MFA has introduced the ICI facility which has great potential for contributing to institution-building in partner countries in the South. However, we would underscore that a precondition for achieving success is a long time horizon.
Institution-building is a long-term proposition that requires patience and commitment.
Assured assistance for longer periods than what is currently the practice would be necessary for institutional relationships to take root.
It is a matter of serious concern, however, that the university sector is likely to be rendered ineligible when the new university law enters into force. We strongly recommend, therefore, that steps be taken urgently to accommodate the universities within the ICI instrument, or by adjusting the instrument to the new situation. In our view, it is perplexing, indeed contrary to the spirit of Finnish development policy, to exclude the university sector from an instrument such as ICI.
5 FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS
Most evaluation templates, guidelines and manuals elaborated by individual donors and their evaluation network under the auspices of the OECD/DAC are geared towards conventional aid interventions: projects and programmes. They are premised on a set of presuppositions such as baselines and a logical framework underlying the design of the interventions to be evaluated. To some extent the existing templates have been overtaken by the changing aid architecture which, among other elements, has provided increased scope for budget support to the displacement of the project and programme aid format. Indeed, this has been a willed development in line with the precepts of the Paris Declaration.
While not resulting from the changing aid architecture but for other reasons, the suggested templates do not fit the object of this evaluation which is different in nature and scope: diverse development research activities operating under different rules, regulations and time frames. They are not neatly defined projects and programmes with specified start and completion points, easily amenable to evaluation in terms of the conventional criteria such as relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and
First, there are no uniform baselines across fields of knowledge against which progress can be made. Second, the benchmarks are generally fuzzy and the indicators of success equivocal. Third, the long time horizon means that the attribution problem – which also confounds conventional evaluations – is writ large in this case because the road from research policy to research output to application is long and convoluted with an array of intervening variables, be they technical or political in nature.
Whereas the criteria of relevance, effectiveness and efficiency can to some extent be applied to research projects, impact and sustainability are well-nigh impossible to apply.
Research results once published are generally global public goods which can be applied by anybody capable of accessing them and translating them to real life situations. They have a lifetime and potential uses which extends far beyond the duration of the research projects themselves. The time horizon of research is much longer than that of conventional projects and programmes, not only the research process itself but also the impact process.
Moreover, it must be underscored that this evaluation is a desk study. We have not been expected to collect primary data by means of field visits and extensive interviewing of stakeholders. Nevertheless, we have interviewed a fair number of respondents, primarily in Finland but also some by telephone elsewhere (see appended list of people consulted). Furthermore, one of the team members based in Uganda made a trip to neighbouring Kenya in an attempt to ascertain information that was imparted to us in Finland and to obtain an impression of the degree to which research projects are initiated by southern collaborators. None the less, the desk study nature of our assignment has imposed severe constraints on our ability to address those evaluation questions listed in the ToR that require independent data collection.
This exercise is a meta-evaluation. It does not and could not possibly make fresh assessments of projects and programmes on an independent basis. With regard to substantive assessments we have drawn on already completed evaluations to the extent we were able to access them.
With these qualifications, drawing on the preceding sections, the conclusions and recommendations of our evaluation are set out in the sections below and related to the overriding questions of the ToR.