3.1 Conclusions

This chapter presents the evaluation’s conclusions on UNDP’s performance and contributions to development results in Zambia, recommendations, and the management response.

Conclusion 1: UNDP’s country programme 2016-2021 is on track to deliver most expected project-level results and outputs. However, evidence of sustainable contributions to the expected development outcomes is limited. UNDP is strategically positioned in the country, but its responsiveness has been in decline.

Stakeholders highlighted UNDP’s added value for its reputational capital, perceived neutrality and its recognized comparative advantages in promoting democratic governance, human rights and gender equality, health and environment. However, despite this strategic positioning, UNDP’s responsiveness was found to be in decline, particularly in effectively and sustainably promoting poverty reduction and enhancing governance accountability and transparency. In recent months, especially in response to COVID, there has been an additional effort to invest in more innovative efforts. However, there is space for improvement and further engagement with other UN agencies and development partners to accelerate development solutions and financing for the SDGs, especially to address poverty eradication.

Conclusion 2: While UNDP is highly trusted and recognized for its support to democratic governance, particularly in elections, it fell short in its results to enhance transparency and accountability in government, a key issue that affected the credibility of the country to secure adequate development funding.

This is in part due to political, administrative and financial constraints. However, UNDP missed opportunities to leverage its perceived neutrality, global capacities and role to integrate the whole of government and whole of society for more holistic solutions. In response to COVID-19, UNDP proved well-positioned and able to help with digital and data support, including supporting social-economic impact assessments and advising on standard operating procedures. UNDP has yet to better capitalize on its global capacity and innovation networks to explore more innovative and transformative solutions for democratic governance, including digital, to tackle anti-corruption issues and help improve transparency and accountability in the country. Unless issues of transparency and accountability in government are addressed, it will be difficult to ensure the necessary funding and support from donors to ensure UNDP’s strategic positioning in all areas.

Conclusion 3: UNDP made good progress in successfully integrating efforts of climate change and resilience with natural resource management and the promotion of livelihoods for income earning opportunities. However, it is not evident that efforts significantly influenced the expected outcomes of economic growth and environmentally sustainable economic development to reduce poverty and inequalities and lower carbon emissions.

Without a more comprehensive theory of change and partnership strategy to fund and scale up such initiatives, the sustainability and impact of such investments are questionable. UNDP contributions were too small in scale to significantly and sustainably contribute to poverty reduction and lower carbon emissions. In regard to upstream policy work, there was limited progress in implementing legislation, and many remain stalled in the drafting stages. The limited progress in reviewing national policies, strategies and legislation for the development minerals sector affected the potential of additional integrated livelihood initiatives, investments and partnerships in the area. The limited progress towards solutions to increase energy efficiency and access was also affected by insufficient in-house capacity and the lack of an adequate financing strategy. This prevented the organization from being strategically positioned to expand partnerships and mobilize adequate resources in a timely way.

Conclusion 4: UNDP made relevant advances in mainstreaming gender equality and women’s empowerment in the programme. However, gender