Chapter

Preface

It gives me great pleasure to present the 2020 Annual Report on Evaluation to the President of the UNDP Executive Board, H. E. Ms. Lachezara Stoeva.

With only ten years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals - and following a devastating pandemic whose impact continues to influence all aspects of our lives - the world finds itself at a crossroads. Only international cooperation and an ambitious set of investments across governance, social protection, green recovery, and digitalization can help countries achieve their objectives and avoid millions of people falling back into extreme poverty. As the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) works at rethinking the future of development, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) is rethinking development evaluation with a new strategy and a stronger commitment to credible and useful evaluations.

Like many others, in 2020 the IEO had to learn how to rapidly adapt to a very different operational environment, in which both data collection and stakeholder engagement became virtual. The whole team strived to ensure continued delivery of evaluative knowledge, while preserving the safety of staff, consultants, and stakeholders. We maintained our commitment to the Board and UNDP and completed our core workplan of thematic and country programme evaluations. At the same time, the IEO took the incredible challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to reboot its approach and methods to enhance the quality and utility of its work. To provide the most relevant evaluative knowledge about effective solutions to complex crisis, we developed the Reflections Series, knowledge products which offered lessons from hundreds of evaluations across thematic areas and shared them widely to support UNDP Country Offices. We revived partnerships and brought to life the Global Evaluation Initiative, a broad and ambitious partnership project to enhance national capacities to use data and evidence for informed decision-making.

The IEO aims to be a progressive leader in the field of evaluation, trusted by its stakeholders to generate evidence that supports UNDP in transforming the vision of sustainable and inclusive development into a reality. We stand ready to work with the UNDP Administrator, the Executive Group, and all UNDP colleagues to make sure that knowledge and lessons learned from evaluations are widely used for a stronger UNDP and the achievement of the SDGs for all.

Many challenges lie ahead of us, but I am confident that, working side by side with our UNDP colleagues and national counterparts, we will emerge from this crisis, together and stronger than ever.

Oscar A. Garcia

Director Independent Evaluation Office, UNDP