Opening Remarks

Your Excellency Xiao Jie, Vice-Chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee,

Your Excellency Achim Steiner, Administrator of UNDP,

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning.

Distinguished guests and representatives,

Ladies and gentlemen,

By the Guishui River and at the foot of the Great Wall, I am very glad to join you at the opening of the 2024 National Evaluation Capacities Conference. I wish to extend my heartfelt welcome to all the distinguished guests coming from afar.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends,

Good morning! As the autumn wind soughs, the maple trees turning red is indicative of the coming of a golden season. It is a great pleasure to gather with you all at the foot of the Great Wall and by the bank of the Guishui River to participate in the opening ceremony of the 2024 National Evaluation Capacities Conference. First of all, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to all the guests on behalf of the Beijing Municipal People’s Government!

Esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

It is truly an honour to stand before you today and share a few words to mark the opening of the National Evaluation Capacities Conference.

Looking around this room, I am filled with both optimism and a profound sense of responsibility.

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.

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a privilege to address the National Evaluation Capacities Conference here in Beijing, which is generously hosted by the People’s Republic of China. I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to CIDCA and the Municipality of Beijing for their warm hospitality.

The conference is an opportunity to ask ourselves clear—but complex—questions:

Good morning colleagues, it is good to see many of you who I have seen right from 2009.

My comments are going to be quite short. I echo the excellent introductory remarks by Oscar and Alison and Andrea, these are totally relevant and will help to shape this very important conference. Resilient evaluation systems for sustainable development Proceedings from the 2022 National Evaluation Capacities Conference 15

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.

Good morning, everyone, it is a genuine pleasure to see you all here.

This is a fantastic opportunity to come together after a period of us being all apart and working remotely and only seeing each other through that small aperture on the screen.

I suspect before COVID-19, we would have taken events like this very much for granted, but I suspect none of us is doing that today and we’re all incredibly privileged to be here.

Capacity-development is at the heart of development. Today we are gathered here to share our experiences about developing evaluation capacity. Not just any capacities, but the capacities to conduct, to commission and to use evaluations.