1B1. Making Accountability Count: Measuring Trust and Protecting Communities

In development practice, accountability should not only flow upward to donors but also outward and downward to communities and participants whose lives are directly affected. Too often, if funding ends abruptly, organizations scale down or exit without proper closure, leaving communities vulnerable and trust eroded. Making accountability count means integrating equity, resilience, and sustainability from the start.

This presentation proposes adding cross-cutting accountability elements to evaluation frameworks so that ethical, financial, downward, and adaptive dimensions are systematically assessed. Organizations should be evaluated not only on technical capacity but also on credibility, transparency, ethics, and their history of responsible implementation. From the outset, projects should include a close-out reserve, a protected fund dedicated to responsible project closure. This ensures that communication, transition, and community engagement continue if funding is interrupted. Donors should also be assessed for ethical responsibility and their record of responsible disengagement.
Evaluations must measure community perception and participation, determining whether people feel informed, respected, and able to influence decisions. This multidirectional approach, where donors, implementers, and communities share responsibility, shifts evaluation from compliance toward genuine protection and resilience.

Cross-Cutting Accountability Elements in Evaluation:

Ethical Accountability

• Focus: Moral responsibility and transparency, fulfilling commitments made to communities.
• NGOs should: Adopt ethical closure standards, report openly on risks and promises, and ensure commitments are realistic and sustained even if funding changes.

Financial Accountability

• Focus: Responsible budgeting and continuity funding.
• NGOs should: Include a protected close-out reserve from the start, plan for responsible closure, and disclose funding structures transparently.

Downward Accountability

• Focus: Trust, participation, and perception.
• NGOs should: Use feedback systems and perception surveys, ensure communities are informed and can influence decisions, and track organizational credibility and fairness.

Adaptive (Resilience) Accountability

• Focus: Flexibility, learning, and shared risk.
• NGOs should: Embed contingency plans and sustainability measures in design, adapt based on learning, and maintain accountability during funding transitions.

Rhode Charles
Rhode Charles is a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning specialist with nineteen years of experience leading evaluations and research across Haiti, Africa, Latin America, and Canada. She has managed multi-million-dollar programs funded by USAID, USDA, Global Affairs Canada, the European Union, the World Bank, and the Mastercard Foundation. A certified Project Management for Development Professional (PMD Pro) and active member of the Canadian Evaluation Society, she promotes ethical, equity-focused, and resilient evaluation systems that strengthen accountability and trust between donors, organizations, and communities.

 

1B2. A Case Study of Evaluation and Internal Audit Partnership on a High-Profile, High-Stakes Project

In large-scale, high-risk infrastructure projects, timely and credible insights are critical for informed decision-making. This presentation explores an innovative collaboration between Transport Canada’s Evaluation and Internal Audit (IA) functions to deliver real-time assurance and advice for Canada’s High-Speed Rail (HSR) initiative. Through early and ongoing collaboration, IA and Evaluation worked together to enable timely corrective actions and continuous improvement throughout the engagement.

Evaluation played a pivotal role in addressing the control objective of Benefits Realization, one of the eight control objectives assessed by the IA team. The Benefits Realization objectives specifically focused on ensuring that intended results were clearly articulated and achievable. To support this, Evaluation facilitated the development of a comprehensive logic model for the HSR initiative, providing a structured framework to define expected outcomes and performance measures. This work was integrated with IA’s recommendations on this control objective and led to a more robust risk management framework with an emphasis on results. Both functions provided real-time advice to the HSR initiative. Evaluation played a specialized role during the development of the logic model, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives and strengthening the initiative’s ability to demonstrate its impact, while IA focused on the development of an integrated HSR risk management framework.

Participants will gain practical insights into:

• How evaluation can serve as a strategic asset to enhance audit work.
• Steps for integrating evaluation and audit perspectives to enhance oversight and adaptive management.
• Lessons learned for fostering collaboration and building organizational capacity in government contexts.

This case study demonstrates that when Evaluation and IA collaborate, organizations can move beyond compliance checks towards smarter, evidence-informed decisions and insights, with the goal of delivering stronger projects, and better value to Canadians.

Kyle Simpson, Evaluation Manager, Transport Canada
Kyle Simpson is an Evaluation Manager at Transport Canada with over 15 years of experience in evaluation within the federal government. He holds a Master’s degree in Experimental Psychology from Carleton University and brings extensive expertise in research and evaluation design. Kyle has applied a wide range of research methods, statistical procedures, and evaluation approaches, including horizontal evaluations of complex initiatives. His work focuses on integrating evaluation into decision-making processes to enhance accountability, and project performance.