2021 Annual Report on evaluation presented to the Executive Board

On 7 June 2021, Dr. Natalia Kanem, UNFPA Executive Director, in her address to the Executive Board annual session 2022 underscored the importance of evaluation to deliver stronger & better for women & girls furthest behind. On behalf of UNFPA, she welcomed the 2021 Annual Report on evaluation and the efforts to strengthen evaluation performance & utilization for decision-making, learning & enhanced accountability across the organization. 

 

 

Marco Segone, Director, UNFPA Evaluation Office presented the 2021 Annual Report on evaluation at UNFPA. The report details the performance, achievements and challenges for the evaluation function in 2021. In particular, the report outlines efforts and initiatives to make evaluation fit to accelerate the delivery of the UNFPA strategic plan 2022-2025, as well as efforts to constantly adapt evaluation to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. 

The report further presents the Evaluation Office’s continued efforts to support the United Nations development system reform process, especially through joint and system-wide evaluations. It also captures Evaluation Office’s efforts to develop national evaluation capacities via intergenerational and multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Ms Diene Keita, UNFPA Deputy Executive Director (Programme), delivered the management commentary to the Executive Board, highlighting the excellent progress in key evaluation performance indicators despite the COVID-19 pandemic. She also noted the role of evaluation evidence and lessons in the development of UNFPA strategic plan 2022-2025 and the design and delivery of country, regional and global programmes.

 

The evaluation session at the Executive Board concluded with a joint statement by 24 Member States (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Ireland, Israel, Finland, Luxembourg, Moldova, Norway, Nigeria, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye and Ukraine).

The joint statement noted the excellent performance of the evaluation function in a highly challenging year, including the strengthening of the decentralized evaluation system. The Member States commended the Evaluation Office on its continued flexibility to adapt evaluation to the COVID-19 context and to enable the evaluations to function as an accelerator to recovery from the COVID-19 crisis. The Member States also commended the latest three evaluation frameworks that are key to make the evaluation function fit to support the delivery of UNFPA strategic plan 2022-2025.

Further, the Member States appreciated the strong push for involving youth in evaluations, including as evaluators. They also welcomed the commitment and active support of the UNFPA Evaluation Office to the reform agenda and encouraged UNFPA to continue to increase investments in the evaluation function.