"Quality Assurance helps us move from a transactional approach to development delivery, forcing us to think about what we plan to achieve and how".

This was remarked by the Director of Operations Committee and Quality Assurance Department of the African Development Bank (AfDB), Simon Mizrahi, at the opening session of the second edition of the Multilateral Development Banks' meeting on quality assurance hosted by the Bank Group on 26-27 April 2018 in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.

"Without strong quality assurance tools and in particular evaluability, it will be much more difficult to learn and capitalize across the organization on what has worked well and what has worked less well," Mizrahi said, highlighting the relevance of the quality assurance function. He further noted the need to demonstrate the development impact of our interventions.

Participants held highly enriching discussions which focused on recent improvements and prospective outlook of the "quality assurance" function, in a changing development finance context. Unanimously, they acknowledged the importance and positive impact of the quality assurance in achieving development goals in a more sustainable manner.

The meetings ended with the following recommendations:

Although there is an increasing focus on quality at entry, ensuring proper implementation and completion is imperative to achieving development results;

Enhancing processing speed should not have negative effect on the quality of approved operations: it is thus key to promote a "result culture" within institutions and set clear quality standards;

There is a pressing need to promote a constructive collaboration between operations and evaluation departments in moving the quality agenda forward.

It is worth noting that the two-day event at the African Development Bank's Headquarters is a follow-up on the one organized in November 2016 in Rome, by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The meetings gathered participants from the following institutions: Asian Development Bank (ADB), Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), European Investment Bank (EIB), International Finance Corporation (IFC), West African Development Bank, European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency, World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and IFAD.