On behalf of the Independent Evaluation Group and GEI, it’s a pleasure to welcome you to the National Evaluation Capacities Conference. As we gather this week, we find ourselves working in an era of unprecedented uncertainty, with overlapping crises like COVID-19, climate change and rising conflict affecting communities worldwide.
In these times, evaluation has a critical role to play—to identify what works and to rebuild trust in institutions by ensuring accountability.
There are three priorities the evaluation community should focus on:
First, we need to harness new data, technology and methods to improve the rigour, quality and usefulness of evaluations. By using tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and geospatial analysis, we can answer complex questions with greater efficiency and precision, pushing evaluation practices into a new dimension.
Second, by collaborating closely with country partners, we can strengthen local engagement, enhance evaluation capacity development and ensure that our evaluations reflect the voices of those most impacted by decisions.
Finally, we must increase our focus on outcomes beyond simple project performance ratings and look at causal contribution and counterfactual analysis to better assess the broader impacts of our interventions.
We deliver our support for capacity development through GEI. We saw the transformative impact of this work during a visit to South Africa, which has helped strengthen evaluation capacity and share best practices.
As global development challenges grow more complex, all countries must have the capacity to design evidence-based policies and track their progress. The National Evaluation Capacities Conference, supported by CIDCA, GEI and the UNDP IEO, offers us a platform to build robust frameworks that drive real change.
Together, we can ensure data are not only collected but also used to tackle today’s challenges and pave the way for tomorrow’s solutions.
As we share knowledge and engage in discussions this week, I would invite you to consider thinking about the following points:
Firstly, managing development today means navigating complexity and unintended consequences.
Development efforts now involve managing a delicate balance of trade-offs and understanding their broader impacts. It’s no longer as simple as measuring success by immediate results. What may seem like a positive outcome on the surface can sometimes carry unintended negative consequences. The challenge we face is to determine whether the results of our interventions are really for the good or actually quite harmful. This is something that requires a deeper understanding of the ripple effects of our work, and being mindful of these complexities is critical.
Next, evaluations must be systemic.
In such a complex environment, evaluation can’t be treated as a one-off exercise. Instead, it needs to be an ongoing process that accompanies development initiatives over the long term, and not just looking at individual projects but entire systems, whole bodies of work and long-term interventions. This systemic approach is demanding, but it’s essential if we’re to understand the full scope of development outcomes and address the interconnected challenges that arise across different sectors over time.
Lastly, rigorous evaluation requires innovation, inclusivity and capacity-building.
Effective evaluation in today’s world demands rigour underpinned by solid frameworks and methodology. At the same time, evaluations must include voices that are often excluded—particularly those from marginalized communities—to ensure we fully understand the impact of development on the ground. We need to focus on building the capacity of evaluators to produce reliable evidence and to use that evidence to make decisions. Key to this—and possibly hardest to achieve—is fostering a culture of curiosity and inquiry, one that is open to both success and failure, and willing to learn from them.
On behalf of the Independent Evaluation Group and GEI, thank you for being here. This conference is an opportunity for us to collaborate, learn and innovate in ways that will help us better manage the challenges we face. Let’s make the most of our time together as we work towards building stronger, more effective systems for monitoring and evaluation (M&E).
