The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland (MFA) commissions regularly meta-evaluations in order to synthesise the findings, explore the issues and assess the reliability of the decentralised evaluations.
The assessment of the evaluation reports includes all decentralised evaluation reports conducted between January 2015 and June 2017. The meta-evaluation consists of two parts:

• Meta-evaluation of the decentralised evaluation reports and their corresponding terms of references.
• Meta-analysis of reliable evaluation findings on Finland's development cooperation verified against the OECD-DAC evaluation criteria demonstrating how Finnish development policy goals have been achieved based on findings in different reports. The meta-analysis also sums up the major issues evident in current development cooperation emerging from the decentralised evaluation reports. The synthesis will conclude what are the main reasons for success or challenges in development co-operation projects and programs and what are the lessons learned based on the findings from evaluation reports.

The purpose of the meta-evaluation is twofold: first, the meta-evaluation helps the MFA to improve the evaluation reports, the evaluation management practices and the overall evaluation capacity development. It also provides an overall picture of the current evaluation portfolio which helps the MFA to identify possible gaps. Second, the meta-analysis is expected to aggregate data and bring forward issues and lessons learned emerging from the evaluation reports as well as give recommendations which will help the MFA to improve the development cooperation. The meta-analysis will sum up what kind of strengths and challenges regarding Finnish development cooperation are identified in different evaluation reports.
Final report available here: https://um.fi/documents/384998/385866/meta_evaluation_report_2018