Independent Magazine - Issue n.5, 2023

THE UN HELPS GOVERNMENTS BUILD NATIONAL EVALUATION CAPACITY

Major changes in our economies and societies need to be effectuated in record time. In order to succeed, these changes will need to be systemic, comprehensive and include voices, values and world views from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. The focus must be on climate justice, just transition, and the full range of the Sustainable Development Goals”. Indran A. Naidoo, IOE Director, delivered this unequivocal call to action on the global stage of the 7th National Evaluation Capacity (NEC) conference, in Turin, Italy.

Organized by the UNDP Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) and the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), from 25-28 October 2022, NEC 7 reflected upon ‘Resilient National Evaluation Systems for Sustainable Development’ following the upheaval brought by the pandemic.

“Evaluation is needed to improve the performance of public policy, to improve people’s lives. The ultimate goal of our presence here is to obtain better development results, and to achieve sustainable development results that we want not only for us, but for our children, and the children of our children. If we don’t act now, we won’t have that future”, said Oscar Garcia, IEO Director.

The event built on the success of past conferences, and brought together over 300 influential evaluation stakeholders and actors from over 100 countries, spanning oversight and accountability sectors across Government, civil society, academia, the United Nations, as well as bilateral and multilateral partners. The event gave renewed emphasis on sharing progress and lessons learned in strengthening national evaluation systems.

“NEC 2022 comes at a time when resilient government systems are all the more important to mitigate crisis, like the one the world is still emerging from. The conference draws on the formidable capacity of the GEI global network, offering more support to governments in their important work of delivering better results to citizens”, noted Dr Naidoo in his remarks during the opening session of the event.

IOE supported the event with other donors, and played an active role in the conference by participating in various sessions. Dr Naidoo was joined by Fabrizio Felloni, IOE Deputy Director, and Dr Mónica Lomeña-Gelis, IOE Senior Evaluation Officer, who each moderated a session stream discussion. In addition, the IOE Director also acted as a panellist during the plenary session on day two.

Moving from the premise that evaluation must consider development impacts across all programmes, Dr Naidoo joined Andrea Cook, Director of Evaluation at WFP; Olivier Cossée, senior evaluation officer at the FAO Office of Evaluation; Dr Anastasia Aladysheva, Impact Evaluation Specialist, Green Climate Fund; and Bala Yusuf-Yunusa, Office of the Senior Special Assistant to the President of Nigeria on SDGs, to discuss the transformative role of the evaluation function, on the second day of the conference.

“From a rural-based perspective, the transformative change that we are looking for is the shift in governments’ and international agencies’ paradigm of agricultural interventions, moving from an anthropocentric approach to one which is more environmentally focused”, explained Dr Naidoo in his intervention.

Moderated by Alan Fox, UNDP IEO Deputy Director, the plenary panel discussion recognized that transformational change is required to avoid further catastrophes caused by the three environmental crises that human actions have caused, namely the climate crisis, nature crisis, and pollution and waste crisis. Participants agreed that evaluation can contribute to finding durable solutions based on sound science and experiences from the field, but that in order to do so it must broaden its vision.

“Development pathways have had a hand in shaping the Anthropocene. Evolution must consider the development impact across all programmes, and not only those addressing environment, climate and food security. Is evaluation facing up to this reality? Whether we wish it or not, a new normal is coming. COVID-19 is just the tip of the sphere”, said Mr Fox.

Whether evaluation is innovative and nimble enough for a rapidly changing world, and how evaluation can foster a systems-thinking approach to bring about transformative change, were the questions at the centre of debate during the parallel session in which the IOE Director acted as moderator and presenter.

“There has been a tendency to view development through a silo approach, not considering that there are multiple pillars and multiple elements that interact. Today, we need to understand all elements of development. For this to happen, we need to look at evaluation, not just in terms of describing what happens, but also in terms of how it can be transformative”, Dr Naidoo underscored.

Titled ‘Evaluating beyond the 2030 Agenda’, the session drew from the experiences of Dugan Fraser, Coordinator GEI, and Dr. Mita Marra, Associate Professor and Editor-in-Chief, Evaluation and Program Planning, University of Naples and the George Washington University. Mr. Fraser presented the experiences of gender-based and feminist evaluation, while Professor Marra highlighted the importance and value added of adopting multiple evaluation methods.

“When we consider the state of evaluations in our public sector evaluations, what is so striking is that monitoring is so much stronger than evaluation. I think there is a reason for that. This relates to a culture of accountability and control. The institutional arrangements around evaluation are such that evaluation gets side lined and marginalized. It’s not mainstreamed into the way that organizations do business”, said Mr Fraser.

On the afternoon of the second day of the conference, Fabrizio Felloni, IOE Deputy Director, acted as moderator during the parallel session titled ‘What can we learn from Sectoral Evaluation systems?’. Recognizing that certain sectors – notably health, education and agriculture – have advanced further in building evaluation systems than cross-sector systems, the session discussed what could be learned from these approaches. The session drew on the experiences of Orifjan Namozov, Deputy Director for Strategic Planning, Programming and Analysis, Ministry of Agriculture of Uzbekistan; Sanjeev Sridharan, Country Lead, Learning Systems and Systems Evaluation at the India Country Office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Dr. Anastasia Aladysheva, Impact Evaluation Specialist, Green Climate Fund; and Alok Mishra, Director General, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, Government of India.

The panel included cases where a governmental M&E system at the sectoral level (agricultural sector in Uzbekistan) still needs to be established and other cases where this has been set up, such as in India (trade) and in Pakistan (health). There where important discussion as to the levels of the analysis of the system (project, sub-sector, country) and what type of data is needed and how to aggregate the analysis at different levels in order to generate findings that are relevant to the national policies. The case of Pakistan was of particular interest, showing examples of disaggregation at the provincial and divisional levels, with the use of GIS-based mapping as a tool to provide feedback to policy makers.

On the third day of the conference, Dr Mónica Lomeña-Gelis, IOE Senior Evaluation Officer co-moderated the parallel session titled ‘Innovative M&E systems’, alongside Renata Mirulla, EvalForward Facilitator. The session discussed opportunities for strengthening the national M&E system and its use for decision-making in the agriculture and rural development sectors. The session was enriched by contributions from Rodrigue Siangoye Owoumbou, Planning, monitoring and evaluation officer, Ministry of Agriculture, Gabon; Mor Seck, Permanent Secretary, Commission for the Evaluation and Monitoring of Public Policies and Programs, Presidency of the Republic of Senegal; Sekou Tidiani Konaté, Director of Coordination, Cooperation and Planning of the National Institute of Statistics, Djibouti; and N’Dia Youssouf, Director of control, M&E at the Ministry of Planning and Development of Côte d’Ivoire.

All panellists coincided with the challenges faced to implement evaluations at the national level due to budget and human resources constraints. The case of the upcoming government-led evaluation of the national agricultural policy in Senegal can be an interesting case where international organizations, such as the UN Rome-based agencies, can contribute as external peer reviewers and strengthen national evaluation capacities.

The UNDP IEO organized the first NEC conference over a decade ago, in 2009 in Casablanca, Morocco, with 55 participants. The conference was a success as it was able to draw unprecedented country and government support. During his eight-year tenure as Director of IEO, Dr. Naidoo, developed and expanded the NEC series to become the largest constellation of thought leadership and training session globally by government participation, reaching 180 countries. The sixth and latest conference in the series was held in Hurghada, Egypt, in 2019, four years after the adoption of the SDGs, with more than 500 participants [here].

The NEC conferences bring together influential players from oversight and accountability sectors to connect, engage and share about issues that fall within the ethos of good governance, evidence-based decision making and better performance management [here].