UNDP is committed to transparency and accountability and places great value in learning from its work in order to continue improving its performance. The previous Handbooks on Monitoring and Evaluation have served the organization well for more than a decade with over 1 million downloads. However, changes globally and across UNDP including the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals; revised Norms and Standards of the United Nations Evaluation Group; UNDP’s revised Evaluation Policy; and the new Strategic Plan, 2018-2021, called for a set of new Evaluation Guidelines.
The increasing necessity of evaluation for accountability, transparency and organizational learning has significantly impacted the evolution of UNDP’s evaluation guidelines over the years, and is captured in this infographic.
The Guidelines bring clarity to roles and responsibilities within UNDP programme units for evaluation; provide more detailed guidance for developing evaluation plans that will ensure broad evaluative coverage of UNDP programmes and give programme units detailed templates to facilitate and strengthen decentralized evaluations. This will support implementation of evaluations and ensure that UNDP decentralized evaluations produce high quality, credible and usable findings, conclusions and recommendations to strengthen our accountability and learning as an organisation.
To develop these Guidelines and strengthen UNDP’s decentralized evaluation function, the IEO engaged extensively with colleagues across headquarters, regional and country offices. The IEO will be collaborating further with regional and country offices throughout 2019 to roll out the Guidelines, with training’s, webinars and workshops.
Although UNDP staff are the primary audience for the Guidelines, I hope they will contribute to the efforts of all our partners who, like UNDP, strive towards greater development effectiveness, writes Indran Naidoo, Director, IEO UNDP.