Evaluation Changes Lives: Realizing Evaluation’s Potential to Inform the Global Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, the world finds itself at a turning point. Depending upon decisions made this year, the world could descend further into violence, suffering and environmental crisis or it could turn towards a brighter, more peaceful and sustainable future serving all people for generations to come. Across the UN, we are engaged in building a better world and defining our collective vision for the future. The discussion is underway about how to end poverty and transform economies, while protecting our environment, ensuring peace, and realizing human rights, social justice and gender equality. Yet how will the world realize its goals of a people-centred agenda for sustainable and equitable development? What do we need to know? What do we need to do differently and better?

The world’s nations and their citizens need to own these questions — and their answers. This is a key element in a new paradigm of accountability, national ownership, partnerships and transparency. People have a right to know about decisions and actions that affect them. “Respect people’s right to evidence” can be a rallying cry for policymakers and citizens alike. Evaluation can play a transformational role here. Evaluation can help us understand if policies and programmes are effective and, most importantly, if they are reaching the most disadvantaged communities, families and individuals: women and men, girls and boys. Evaluation can help us know if public money is being used efficiently and wisely. Evaluation can help us see what is working and not working, and why. Evaluation can answer these questions in the public interest. But once evaluators gather that evidence, governments and citizens must have access to it, and use it to inform public debates and decisions, so they can resist harmful actions and interventions. Most UN entities have an evaluation office to help gather evidence and promote its use. Yet working alone, these units cannot realize evaluation’s full potential.

This is where UNEG comes in. As a professional network, it sets quality standards, provides professional support and amplifies United Nations evaluators’ voices. This, in turn, enables evaluation offices across the organization to provide strategic, meaningful contributions to the global community, the United Nations system and to each office. By fostering appropriate analysis and well-informed decisions, UNEG helps the sharpen and strengthen the organization’s relevance, efficiency and effectiveness.

In the coming years, UNEG will work for a stronger, system-wide UN mechanism to provide evidence of what works and what does not work in system-wide initiatives, including United Nations reform and the System-Wide Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. UNEG will support each one of its members, no matter its size, resources and capacities, to ensure its evaluation functions are relevant and robust. It will help its members to serve and strengthen the United Nations, in development and humanitarian contexts, in stable and fragile countries, and ultimately,for all the world’s people.

As the United Nations Secretary General says. The UN can’t do this alone. Even nations can’t do it alone. As the Secretary General says in his report, The Road to Dignity by 2030: “The new agenda must become part of the contract between people, including civil society and responsible business, and their This is why UNEG is engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, united under the banner of EvalPartners, a global partnership to strengthen national capacities for equity- focused and gender-responsive evaluation. EvalPartners brings together parliamentarians, policy makers, UN agencies, multilateral banks, private foundations and civil society organizations. Together, they can strengthen countries’ capacities to demand high-quality evaluation, to supply it, and to use the evi- dence generated by good quality evaluation system to inform their national development strategies. UNEG is a key EvalPartners part- ner, committed to make a difference — as we demonstrated when we successfully advocated for the General Assembly Resolution on national evaluation capacity building approved in 2014.

UNEG will serve the United Nations in building a world that works: free of poverty, discrimination and gender inequalities; a world of peace, social justice and respect for the environment. Evaluation is a means of empowering people, towards these goals. It should be embraced as an adjunct to democracy and enhanced human rights. To help meet these massive challenges, UNEG needs to be strong. If it is, it can offer powerful evidence, knowledge, and understanding of what works. During 2015, UNEG faces tremendous challenges to progress towards the vision set out above. There could not be a better moment for UNEG and its members to step forward, as the world seeks a more sustainable and equitable future. During the International Year of Evaluation and beyond, UNEG will be carrying the torch of evaluation, spreading the illumination of evidence and helping to build a better world.