Mr. Ruair? de B?rca:

Every single proposal we bring forward for funding within the general rubrics which we agree interdepartmentally is subject to a series of forms of assessment, scrutiny, evaluation and reporting. Depending on the type of project or programme that we fund and its value and scale, we have slightly different processes, which are subject to a series of checks and balances. For example, if it is a country in which we have an embassy, the embassy has a strategy which is worked out over a period of about six to nine months looking at the government of that country's poverty-reduction strategy. It identifies partners. Sometimes we have been working with them for a while. Sometimes we have worked with other partners as well in a consortium where we share the risk and share the analysis. Part of that is looking at the organisational capacity of the delivery agent to do the work that we want it to do. We do value for money analysis in advance and then we do follow up monitoring and evaluations, often mid-term, to make sure that it is what it is and we make adjustments as necessary.