Meta-Evaluation of Urban Projects

USAID programming is responding to an increasingly urbanized world, where a majority of the urban population of developing countries face poverty challenges manifested in poor health outcomes, unemployment, food insecurity, losses from extreme weather, and street violence. As a result, sectoral approaches need to be re-examined in order to appropriately address specific urban conditions, and urban development programs need to broaden their focus in order to attain the Agency’s Core Development Objectives, by adopting a more holistic approach. Sector-specific projects can address the urban dimensions of a wide range of problems, employing tactics and resources specifically adapted to cities. This synthesis of urban program evaluations applies an urban lens to projects in order to derive lessons for programing and implementation across a variety of sectors, and draws on examples from the following areas:

• Health (e.g., India Improving Health of the Urban Poor Project);
• Local governance (e.g., Serbia Local Governance Reform Project);
• Economic growth (e.g., Ukraine Local Investment and National Competitiveness Project);
• Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) (e.g., Indonesia WASH Project);
• Service delivery (e.g., Kosovo Democratic Effective Municipalities Initiative);
• Climate adaptation (e.g., Ukraine Municipal Heating Reform Program); and
• Crisis and violence prevention (e.g., El Salvador Municipal Competitiveness Project).