Slovakia first joined the donor community with its accession to the OECD and the European Union and became the twenty-seventh OECD member to join the DAC in 2013.

The Act on Official Development Assistance designated the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic (MFEA) as the National Coordinator for development assistance. The MFEA subsequently established a budgetary entity, the Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation (SAIDC) responsible for managing and implementing bilateral and trilateral development projects under the supervision of the MFEA. The mandate for evaluation of ODA is assigned to the Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid Department (DCHAD), a department primarily responsible for development co-operation and humanitarian aid agenda within the MFEA. The DCHAD is staffed by a desk officer, who acts as Evaluation Manager. Evaluations were initially undertaken sporadically without a comprehensive system. To address this, the Evaluation and Monitoring Strategy was developed and approved in 2014.

The Slovak evaluation system is undergoing significant change. Detailed evaluation guidelines are currently being prepared. A fully-fledged evaluation framework will be implemented by 2017, including an evaluation policy. The policy will clearly define the roles and responsibilities with a systematic approach to evaluation, including clear budgeting and planning rules and their effective use and follow-up. The purpose of evaluation is to find out to what extent the projects and programmes are carried out in accordance with the set objectives and indicators. The evaluation also provides a reply as how the development activity answers the local needs of the partner countries, what its impact on target groups is and to what extent the development co-operation activities are relevant, efficient, effective and sustainable.

The annual evaluation work plan of Slovakia is formulated by the DCHAD together with policy makers and senior management. The new evaluation policy envisages that the evaluation plan is approved by the MFEA, first by the Director-General and followed by the MFEA Board. It will be submitted for final approval to the Government as part of the Annual ODA Strategy.

The Evaluation Advisory Board will be put in place in the new evaluation setup. The Board will include SAIDC representatives, Slovak diplomatic missions personnel and independent experts when needed, and will form an indispensable part of the evaluation system, being involved in overseeing the evaluation, assessing the reports and evaluation results and proposing the management response. The members of Advisory Board will be appointed by the MFEA.