What the OECD DAC Criteria Mean in Practice

The OECD DAC evaluation criteria — relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability — are sometimes treated as a checklist. They are not. They are six lenses that, used together, force an honest assessment of a programme.

Relevance asks whether the intervention is doing the right thing for the context. Coherence asks whether it fits with other interventions. Effectiveness asks whether the intended results are being achieved. Efficiency asks whether the resources are being used well. Impact asks what changed because of the intervention. Sustainability asks whether the change will outlast the funding.

In practice, evaluators do not get equally strong evidence on all six. The discipline is to be explicit about which criteria are well-evidenced, which are partially evidenced and which rely on judgement. That honesty is what makes the evaluation useful.

The DAC criteria also force evaluators to separate activity from outcome. Many programmes complete their activities. Far fewer can credibly demonstrate that those activities changed something that mattered. That distinction is the heart of evaluation.