The Ex ante Evaluation of the Rural Development Programme for Mainland Finland 2014-2020 aims to improve the design, content and efficiency of the programme. The evaluation project is processed in close cooperation with the managing authority of the programme.
The Member States of the EU are obliged to perform ex ante evaluations of their new Rural Development Programmes for the next programming period 2014-2020. The ex ante evaluation is expected to proceed parallel with the programme design process.
The evaluation project has a developmental approach in order to focus on producing concrete and immediately exploitable information for the programme. The role of the evaluation project is to assess the completeness and validity of the SWOT analysis and the state-of-art in the rural areas. Focus group interviews and targeted questionnaires of various stakeholders will lead to more consultative and participatory design of the Rural Development Programme. Impact analysis will help to identify if the development issues have been identified properly and if the strategy and objectives are relevant to national and regional needs and consistent with policies and guidelines of the EU.
The ex ante evaluation process allows refinements and improvements of drafts of the programme so that the programme will be able to achieve its objectives in a cost-effective manner.