Follow-up of ICAI Reviews from Years 1, 2 and 3

Review

A key component of ICAI’s mandate is to follow up on its recommendations and to assess the progress made by the Department For International Development (DFID) and other government departments on the issues identified by our reports.

The follow-up work undertaken for this report covers 22 of the 35 reports published during the first three years of ICAI. This gives us a good basis from which to assess how DFID has responded to recommendations over a wide range of different reports and over time.

One area we have particularly focused on for follow up is Education. In our previous reports on education in six countries we were concerned about emphasis on numbers of enrolment rather than quality of learning. We are pleased with the progress which DFID is now making in this area and have recommended long term work with national governments to ensure consistency of effort.

Over 43 reports to May 2015, the Government has accepted 96 recommendations fully; 25 partially and rejected 8.

Overall, we can see that DFID has taken action to address the great majority of our recommendations.  We acknowledge the positive efforts that DFID teams have made in addressing our recommendations and the work which goes into it.

Individual reports do have outstanding areas of action and the Commission has some recommendations to improve the effectiveness and consistency of the process by which DFID frames its management responses.  We have made a limited number of specific further recommendations, where there are significant issues that need to be addressed and we consider that it is most useful to do so.