Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to Italy, which is the home of the United Nations World Food Programme and this year’s National Evaluation Capacities conference.
The World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger; and at the moment it’s actively involved in feeding 130 million of the most poor and vulnerable in in the world in the face of the conflicts and challenges that we’ve been discussing.
As others have said, we meet at what I believe to be a really pivotal moment in international development as the world we live in today is not the one we imagined seven years ago when all nations united to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals. At the World Food Programme we’re acutely aware of the rise of hunger and food insecurity, the impact of long drawn-out conflicts and the desperate need to build peace. We know that the socioeconomic impact of COVID-19 will be felt for many years to come and we’re starting to wake up to the reality of the growing risk of climate change.
As Oscar and Alison have said, it’s especially in these times of crisis where truth and objectivity are often lost, this is a moment for evaluation to really shine a light, so that our leaders and ourselves can make the best possible decisions based on evidence that informs our actions - so that we know what’s working, what isn’t and why, so that we can build forward better and most importantly make sure we’re not leaving anyone behind. But to achieve this, evaluation must thrive in every nation. All countries need robust evaluation evidence, strong national systems,strong evaluation policies and above all the capacities to be able to be in the driver’s seat of their own development agendas.
I stand here today because the World Food Programme is firmly committed to strengthening national capacities. In 2017, we took a step to create Regional Evaluation Units to respond to the commitments of the 2014 United Nations General Assembly resolution on building National Evaluation Capacities. The aim of that Resolution was to support governments and to partner with National and Regional evaluation institutions and experts to build and strengthen evaluation capacities around the world.
As Alison has said, I think we’ve seen in the past decade, and since 2014, a real acceleration in that progress and that’s really heartening. But there’s a great challenge before us as the era of the Sustainable Development Goals hits the midpoint. There is an urgent need to review activities and to track progress both globally and nationally, and evaluation is called upon to shine a much more powerful light on the achievement of the SDGs.
Resilient evaluation systems for sustainable development Proceedings from the 2022 National Evaluation Capacities Conference 14 I would urge all of us here to seize this rare opportunity of being together across the many sessions that our colleagues have organized over these three days. I really encourage you to ask two key questions: firstly, how can evaluation, and the evidence it generates, be more relevant to the critical decisions being made in our countries; and secondly, how can we strengthen capacities, so that evaluations are more responsive to country needs, more empowering, more useful and more engaging and inclusive.
On this note I’d like to say a final word on an initiative that is gaining momentum this year, and this is an initiative which is being led by the Government of Nigeria supported by the World Food Programme, UNICEF, UN Women, EvalPartners, IDEAS, the United Nations Evaluation Group and others - and this is for a United Nations resolution on strengthening evaluation towards the SDGs.
We believe this Resolution will be a perfect complement to the 2014 Resolution, accelerating the progress that’s being made in strengthening National Evaluation Capacities, and through country-led evaluations looking at progress towards the SDGs, looking at progress towards national policies and programmes to contribute to strengthening national evaluation cultures and ensuring that the expertise really does meet the demand for evaluative evidence.
With Nigeria here present through the office of the Special Senior Assistant to the President on the SDGs, I hope we’ll have an opportunity to know more about this effort and I encourage you to reach out to discuss it. Finally, I’d like to thank our colleagues from UNDP for hosting this conference. It is really vital at this time to provide this space for discussion amongst partners, so that we can advance this dialogue, and above all learn from one another. So, I wish you all a pleasant and productive conference.
Thank you!
