1. During the pre-conference Raghavan Narayanan and Fredrik Korfker delivered a training session of a day in which we presented the basics of private sector evaluation and highlighted in a separate presentation the importance to learn lessons and use the lessons in new operations. The pair also presented two case studies, one on an evaluation of an equity fund and another case study on an investment in wind farm. The presentations were very interactive and resulted in lively discussion among the 35 participants.

2. On Thursday 19 October Mehmet Uzunakaya and Elsa Sarmento presented the results of some of the work done in the our Sub-group on PPP evaluation. In the presentations Mehmet gave a literature overview of programme theory, theory of public investment and project finance theory, resulting in a very interesting theory of change for PPP development (normative intervention logical framework he calls it) which could form the basics for rigorous PPP evaluation, while Elsa talked about the applicability of the Theory of Change.

3. On the same day Raghavan did a slide presentation called “Murder on the Orient Express”, thereby focussing on impact investing, the need to measure impact in this respect and the practices of evaluation within the impact investing sector, which seem to take on new levels of sophistication. This is an area where more interaction between development evaluators and practitioners measuring social impact is needed.

4. On the last day of the Conference we had organised a panel on private sector evaluation. Raghavan chaired the panel. Participants in the panel from our TWG were Elsa and I and I had invited in addition Bas Warmenhoven of PwC in The Hague (The Netherlands) who is responsible for managing the Dutch Good Growth Fund (DGGF) and Kashif Iqbal of the Export Financing Institutions attached to the Islamic Development Bank. Each of the panel members approached private sector evaluation from their own experience. We had good questions from the audience which showed that there is a lot of interest to learn more about private sector evaluation.

All presentations are available for download here.

Learn more information about EES participation at the NEC conference 2017:

• An Outlook of EES contribution to the NEC conference 2017
• The TWG on Young and Emerging Evaluators contribution to the NEC conference 2017