Management Response to the Annual Report on the Evaluation Function in UN Women

1. Management Response to the Annual Report on the Evaluation Function in UN Women

2. Evaluation in UN Women • UN Women is committed to a strong evaluation function as a foundation for everything it does. • UN Women’s management draws upon evaluation findings to inform programmatic and strategic decisions. • The evaluation function, as well as evaluation as a mainstreamed part of programming, is also key to UN Women’s ambition to be a knowledge broker. • UN Women also considers evaluation as a lever through which UN Women’s experience of its coordination/ normative/ operational mandate can inform practice of UN partners, including through ‘fit-for-purpose’ discussions.

3. Using evaluation better • In the past year, UN Women has: • Strengthened its programme appraisal and quality assurance process, with greater attention to programmatic learning, and a requirement for offices to explain in programme documents the incorporation of lessons learned from evaluation. • Established a practice of “thematic dialogues” between HQ and the field which share lessons learned, including from evaluation. • Held corporate webinars with the evaluation office to share findings from thematic evaluations.

4. Other key issues • UN Women is pleased that all areas of the Strategic Plan are well covered by evaluations. • UN Women is also pleased by the high proportion of joint evaluations. • Efforts to strengthen RBM capacity are expected to make UN Women’s work more evaluable. • Not all UN Women’s offices have the resources to assign effective M&E focal points. We anticipate that this will improve as more resources become available and offices are strengthened. In the interim we continue to support Country Offices from Regional Offices in this areas as in others.

5. Other key issues • UN Women acknowledges that there has a been a decrease in the rate of management responses from last year. This is an area UN Women will focus on for improvement in coming years. Some of this is attributable to the additional complexity of developing joint management responses to joint evaluations. • At the same time, UN Women notes the increase in management response related key actions reported, and sees this as indicative of increased commitment to act on evaluation findings. • UN Women is also pleased to note the increase from 49% in 2012 to 55% in 2013 of completed planned evaluations.

6. Other key issues • After a period of change with the new regional architecture, management is very focused on further strengthening capacity and oversight, including through regional offices and systems and processes at HQ. • With regard to those evaluations that were not carried out, the majority were in West and Central Africa which did not yet have an evaluation specialist in place. We expect this to improve with the arrival of the new regional evaluation specialist. • UN Women’s review of country programmes at the end of 2013 identified proper allocation of resources to evaluation as an element in budget preparation, and we expect the figure of budget allocated to evaluation to improve in coming years.

7. Looking forward • It is very positive that UN Women is playing a strong role in UNEG, and the organization is happy with progress on the SWAP, and with our role in EvalPartners. • We look forward to the future programme of work of the evaluation office based on the evaluation plan to ensuring the utility and relevance of those evaluations. • We also look forward to further strengthening the use of evaluation findings at all levels across UN Women. • The UNEG peer review of the evaluation function will provide additional insights. • Evaluation will be critical to inform our planning for the Mid-Term Review of the Strategic Plan 2014-2017