The draft ICPE report was quality-assured by an internal peer-review process, and external review process, before being submitted to the country office and RBLAC for identification of factual errors and comments. The revised report was then shared with the Government and other national partners for comments. A final stakeholder debriefing was held over videoconference, which brought together representatives of the major stakeholders of the programme. The event offered an additional opportunity to discuss the results of the evaluation and ways forward for UNDP in the next cycle, including the management response presented by the country office.
Evaluation limitations The main limitation of the study was the difficulty in gaining access to stakeholders and capturing the insights and nuances that are traditionally achieved through fieldwork, but can be lost in the virtual modality. The ICPE data collection process was conducted alongside the presidential electoral process, before the new Government took office. This overlap with the transitional period brought difficulties in securing some interviews, due to competing priorities of partners in the handover process. The evaluation team mitigated this situation by diversifying the types of actors to be interviewed. Difficulties in reaching stakeholders were further exacerbated by a surge of COVID-19 cases in the country and new mobility restrictions which made it impossible to carry out in-person visits to project sites on the ground or reach and interview groups of local beneficiaries. To mitigate this, the evaluation team broadened the scope and depth of its secondary data review and expanded the consultation period to accommodate mitigation measures, although not all types of information could be collected remotely.
1.3 Country context The Republic of Ecuador is an upper-middle-income economy,8 with an estimated population of 17.7 million in 2021,9 64 percent of whom reside in urban areas.10 Its Human Development Index of 0.759 is lower than the regional average for Latin America.11 Nevertheless, it belongs to the category of high human development countries, ranking 86 out of 189 countries and territories in 2019. Historically, Ecuador has experienced economic volatility, social inequality and structural unemployment, and its economy has been highly dependent on oil exports. Global oil prices fell by 70 percent between mid-2014 and early 2016, causing a severe impact on Ecuador as revenues plunged and public spending and investment declined.12 The devastating 2016 earthquake deepened the country’s economic recession.13 Since then, economic recovery has been weak and the employment market has deteriorated. In 2020, the economy was hit by a decline in the worldwide oil price and the COVID-19 pandemic, which generated an unprecedented crisis reflected by a 7.8 percent drop in its gross domestic product.14
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The World Bank. Data for Ecuador. https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=EC-XT. National Institute of Statistics and Censuses of Ecuador (INEC). https://www.ecuadorencifras.gob.ec/estadisticas. United Nations data for Ecuador as of 2019. https://data.un.org/en/iso/ec.html. Human Development Report 2020. http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/ECU#. The World Bank Group (2018), ‘The 2014-2016 Oil Price Collapse in Retrospect’. In April 2016, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 hit the country, generating an estimated loss of 22,000 jobs, and the estimated cost of reconstruction in the affected areas was approximately $2,250 million. Central Bank of Ecuador, Press Bulletin, 31 March 2021. https://www.bce.fin.ec/index.php/boletines-de-prensa-archivo/item/1421-lapandemia-incidio-en-el-crecimiento-2020-la-economia-ecuatoriana-decrecio-7-8.
Chapter 1. BACKGROUND AND INTRODUC TION
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