The Evaluation of Budget support in Burkina Faso assessed all budget support operations conducted in the country between 2009 and 2014. The study was jointly managed by the European Union, the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Burkina Faso, the technical secretariat of the Strategy for Accelerated Growth and Sustainable Development (STN-SCADD) and the representatives of the development partners providing budget support (African Development Bank, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the World Bank).
The main objective of this evaluation was to assess to what extent budget support successfully assisted the partner government to implement national and sectoral policies and to what extent it helped improve their efficacy and efficiency to impact sustainably on growth and development. The evaluation paid particular attention to policy dialogue, including Government-civil society and Government-private sector dialogue.
The evaluation followed the methodological approach by OECD/DAC for budget support evaluations ("3-Step approach"). Step 1 corresponds to an analysis of the direct and induced effects of budget support, including in terms of macroeconomic stability and of public policies. This analytical step covers all sectors targeted by budget support. Step 2 corresponds to a detailed impact evaluation and covers two sectors: health and water and sanitation. During the third step, the evaluation synthesizes the findings of the previous phases and globally assesses the contribution of general and sector budget support to development results in Burkina Faso.
The evaluation provided recommendations not only based on the assessment of the actual disbursements during the evaluation period (2009-2014) but also based on the analysis of the previous phases, including the policy dialogue and the different analyses that led to the formulation of these budget support operations. The recommendations covered:

• circumstances under which budget support has influenced (or not) the definition and implementation of national and sectoral policies, the intensity and nature (positive or negative) of budget support impacts on Burkina Faso;
• improvements to be made by donors in order to maximise the impact of budget support;
• constraints and limits linked to governmental politics, institutional structures and administrative mechanisms in Burkina Faso which can attenuate the efficacy and the global impact of public expenditures and targeted public policies as well as the improvements to be made by the government to maximise the impact of budget support;
• concepts and implementation of future budget support activities in Burkina Faso.

The report is available at:
https://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/joined-strategic-evaluation-budget-support-burkina-faso-2009-2014_en