This refers to the technical assistance provided by FAO to member countries in the form of projects and programmes. Also included are projects or programmes for agricultural relief and rehabilitation in the case of natural and man-made disasters. These programmes/projects are funded by bilateral donors, the countries themselves, and the UN system - and also by FAO itself through the FAO Technical Cooperation Programme (TCP) and Special Programme for Food Security (SPFS). All projects with a budget of more than US$ 1 million,as well as those with budgets over US$ 600,000 and a duration of three years or more are usually evaluated by a fully independent mission at least once in the project life. As well as providing a balanced mix of technical expertise, missions normally consist of one representative each from the recipient country of the project, the funding agency and FAO. The TCP-funded projects are evaluated by the Evaluation Service with external consultants, through clusters of projects, by selected themes.

Evaluation missions are normally organized by the operating units with Evaluation Service guidance and are carried out according to FAO evaluation procedures. Besides producing evaluation reports all evaluation missions are asked to record their findings in a project evaluation questionnaire which is returned to the Evaluation Service. The reports are reviewed by the Evaluation Service, assessed for their evaluation quality and kept in the Service's records. Summaries are produced from the reports. The questionnaires results are entered in the Service's electronic database which, together with the summaries is used to produce periodic syntheses of field evaluation reports.