Improving the Practice of Value for Money Assessment

This CDI Practice Paper* by Julian Barr and Angela Christie brings together recent work at Itad to examine the origins of the concept of value for money (VFM) in the performance audit of public expenditure and its increasing prominence as a tool applied to support the management of publicly funded international development. It considers similarities and differences between VFM audit and evaluation, and identifies opportunities to strengthen the practice of both. The paper outlines the challenge of using VFM concepts to improve development impact and proposes a VFM diagnostic tool to help meet this challenge, drawing on practice examples from the past three years to illustrate its use.