Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, dear colleagues and friends,
It is a privilege to join the 7th National Evaluation Capacities Conference being held in the historic city of Turin. It is hosted by the Global Evaluation Initiative and the Independent Evaluation Office of the UNDP, or IEO.
The theme of this year’s conference reflects on the importance of building resilient National Evaluation Systems. Heeding the harsh lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, building resilience must be at the centre of all our efforts: from shaping more robust healthcare systems; to reinforcing social protection; to rolling out new insurance solutions. This will enable countries and communities to be better prepared for the next crisis.
To give just one example, look to the Philippines where UNDP is working closely with the National Economic and Development Authority to develop and strengthen government evaluation systems. This is helping to ensure that there is stronger evidence and data-based decision-making, which is also helping to strengthen government accountability.
As we seek to support countries to build up-to-date national evaluation capacities, we must first look inwards and see where we ourselves can improve. For example, the IEO of UNDP is rolling out several new tools as it aims to get ahead of a rapidly changing development landscape.
Look, for instance, at the Artificial Intelligence for Development Analytics initiative, or AIDA. It aimed to tackle the challenge of extracting evidence from our archives, which was manual, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. AIDA is a machine learning model that extracts key insights from 6,000 evaluation reports stored in the IEO Evaluation Resource Centre, complete with a web portal to access the findings.
Ultimately, by helping colleagues to extract crucial data from evaluations, it is ensuring that everyone in UNDP can make more informed decisions on their projects and programmes. There are also a range of new online courses so that UNDP and United Nations personnel can learn new evaluation skills - or keep up to date with new and emerging developments in the field.
We are also making a concerted effort to learn from our partners and outside sources. Consider, for instance, our call for submissions in advance of this conference which surfaced a range of innovative approaches. That included innovative data collection and management systems in countries as diverse as Eritrea, Belarus and Cabo Verde. The Belarusian statistical authority, for example, is finding new ways to combine data sources to improve reporting on the SDGs.
Other submissions include innovative ways to ensure that evaluation was maintained during the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes an example from Senegal, where mobile phone data was used to measure and address the socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic.
Evaluation is not only helping UNDP to deliver even better results for the countries and communities that we serve as we advance the Sustainable Development Goals. By continuously updating our own evaluation systems, UNDP is also able to offer this expertise to our partner countries.
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, the evidence demonstrates that evaluation strengthens the transparency of governments and ensures accountability to citizens. In doing so, national monitoring and evaluation systems play an important role in building stable, resilient societies.
Indeed, at a time when viruses and climate change pay no heed to borders, we must recognise that our common challenges require our collective intelligence. In this respect, this conference is an opportunity to share cutting-edge evaluation approaches and new solutions that can be the foundation for interventions that can help drive some of the tangible changes that we need. That includes everything from projects that can help countries decarbonize rapidly; to new ways expand access to clean energies; to infrastructure that can create new green jobs; to advancing gender equality.
Ultimately, evaluation can also provide decision-makers with the evidence they need to adapt programmes, projects and institutions that can help break our global uncertainty complex: helping to improve the health and wellbeing of both people and planet.
Finally, I wish you a most productive session.
Thank you.
