About Evaluation Excellence Award

INTRODUCTION

Evaluations are a vital component of programme and project management. High-quality evaluations are key tools for making decisions about programme priorities and directions. Evaluations provide evidence of what is working and what is not, identify factors contributing to or hindering the achievement of objectives, and present opportunities to refine future programmes. To promote the recognition and the use of high-quality decentralized evaluations, the IEO established the Evaluation Excellence Awards.

ELIGIBILITY

Any decentralized evaluation carried out in 2022 and uploaded in the Evaluation Resource Centre before 31 December 2022 will be eligible.

PROCESS

➔ All 2022 decentralized evaluation reports will be quality assessed according to the usual practice. The IEO’s assessment team, who are very familiar with decentralized evaluations in UNDP, will also be asked to highlight innovative evaluations in addition to regular practices.

➔ Reports receiving a 6 (highly satisfactory) or 5 (satisfactory) rating will be automatically longlisted for consideration for the awards.

➔ Longlisted reports will be re-scored by a second assessor, to calculate average scores and rankings. Reviewers will also highlight innovative evaluations in the second review.

• Outstanding evaluation: Quality assessment scores will be averaged, and the reports ranked. The top-ranking reports will be considered for this award.
• Innovative evaluation: The innovation markers will be used to identify evaluations that display innovation, as identified during the two review processes.
• Gender-responsive evaluation: Scores on the gender-related quality assessment questions will be averaged and used to identify the most gender-responsive evaluations. Reports with the highest scores on the gender aspects will be considered for the award.

➔ Final selection of the awards: The IEO will select three to five reports for each category of award, based on the scoring and the innovation markers. Reports may fall into more than one category at this stage. Members of IEO’s Evaluation Advisory Panel will select the finalists in each category.

RECOGNITION

The winners will be announced first at the awards ceremony, and on the IEO website and UNDP’s intranet immediately afterwards. To promote UNDP’s work to improve and refine its evaluation function, country offices and programme units receiving awards will also be invited to publish a blog highlighting key elements of the evaluation process and how the evaluation findings, conclusions, and recommendations are being used. The blog will be cross-posted across UNDP’s platforms. The winning evaluations will also feature in UNDP’s Annual Report on Evaluation.