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UNDP Evaluation Guidelines
UNDP Evaluation Guidelines

Welcome to the updated UNDP Evaluation Guidelines. The Evaluation guidelines have been updated to reflect a number of changes in UNDP in recent years across evaluation in UNDP and to bring them into line with the new UNDP Strategic Plan, Agenda 2030 and the adoption of the SDGs.

The Evaluation Guidelines give renewed emphasis to the importance of planning for evaluations and ensuring appropriate evaluative coverage of UNDP’s work across our programmes; they provide greater detail on expected roles and responsibilities for evaluation; and include links to examples of good quality evaluations, with a view to strengthening the quality and utility of future decentralized evaluations.

The UNDP Evaluation guidelines replaces the evaluation sections of the Handbook on Planning, Monitoring and Evaluating for Development Results, which can still be found here.

The UNDP Evaluation guidelines include six sections, which will be updated regularly to address changes within the organization.

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Terminal Evaluation
Terminal Evaluation

Guidance for Conducting Terminal Evaluations of UNDP-Supported, GEF-Financed Projects

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Terminal Evaluation Terms of Reference

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COVID-19 Terminal Evaluation Terms of Reference

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Mid-term Review
Mid-term Review

Guidance for Conducting Midterm Reviews of UNDP-Supported, GEF-Financed Projects

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Mid-term Review Terms of Reference

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COVID-19 Mid-term Review Terms of Reference

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Dignostic Tool
National Evaluation Diagnostic Guidance

The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of UNDP, as part of its ongoing support to national evaluation capacity development, has developed a diagnostic guidance for the evaluation of the national development plans (and progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)). Supported by NORAD, the main objectives are to: facilitate development or strengthening of a national evaluation framework for the SDGs, respond to existing gaps in national evaluation thinking and practice, inform country-led evaluation processes and systems, and respond to countries’ preference for national evaluation diagnostics as against the SDG evaluation diagnostics. The guidance aims to provide a flexible and practical framework to enable governments and other development actors to develop a systematic approach to determining key areas, pathways, and parameters for evaluating national development strategies and SDGs. The Guidance will be followed by easy to use online tool. The IEO is the process of identifying champion countries for piloting the Guidance.

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Dignostic Tool
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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