Country Programme Performance Rating System
The UNDP evaluation function has experienced significant growth over the years, increasing
the need for evaluation knowledge management strategies to support users to make sense of the
increasing wealth of evaluative data on UNDP performance. The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO)
has taken various steps to streamline the evaluation process, improve quality, and expand the use
of its evaluative work. Such efforts have included the introduction of specific methodology tools,
ongoing efforts to leverage machine-learning to support evaluation synthesis, and new lessons
products such as evaluation synthesis reports. The introduction of a programme performance rating
system (hereafter ‘rating system’) for use in UNDP Independent Country Programme Evaluations
(ICPEs) to determine the contribution of UNDP country programmes is another effort to consolidate
the IEO resources and data architecture to support organizational learning.
The rating system will enable evaluation performance to be summarized and quantified, as well as
facilitating the codification of performance across internationally recognized evaluation criteria for comparison, analysis and synthesis. Rating systems have been widely used by multilateral development banks and
international financial institutions (IFIs) in their corporate evaluation practices. In UNDP, rating systems
have been unevenly applied across some global thematic evaluations, and at country level in the context
of decentralized Global Environment Facility evaluations.
The rating system was developed in 2021 and piloted in 12 ICPEs. An IEO Evaluation Advisory Panel meeting
in late 2021 featured a session on the rating system, where issues observed during the pilot phase were
discussed. This was followed by an internal workshop of the lead evaluators of the ICPEs to identify areas
requiring further clarification and revision. Based on this, the rating system has been improved, ready to
be rolled out in all ICPEs in 2022. IEO also plans to develop a similar system for decentralized evaluations.
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