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UN report stresses evaluation in efforts to attain Sustainable Development Goals

Xinhua, March 14, 2015 Adjust font size:

A new UN report on Friday underlined the critical role of evaluation in offering credible evidence to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, the post- 2015 global development agenda to be adopted by world leaders in September.

The report, by the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG), said partnership, capacity-building, evidence for learning are UNEG's top priorities.

"We must review what we learned implementing the Millennium Development Goals -- what worked (and) what didn't work," said Deborah Rugg, chair of UNEG, at the launch of the new publication. "As evaluators, we offer evidence to answer these question and help determine what needs to be done differently."

The Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight anti-poverty targets to be reached by its deadline of 2015, will be replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of targets for all UN member states for the next 15 years starting the year of 2016.

According to the UNEG report, capacity building for evaluation at the country level was the key to the nations' ownership of the development agenda and improved public accountability, as witnessed by the success of the Moroccan Evaluation and the national monitoring and evaluation system of the Philippines.

The official launch of the publication took place here Friday during the 2015 UNEG Evaluation Week on March 9-13, which brought together UN evaluators from all over the world to discuss the inclusion of evaluation in the post-2015 development agenda and empowerment of nations through evaluation capacity building.

"Evaluation everywhere, and at every level, will play a role in implementing the new development agenda," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at a the High-Level Event of the Evaluation Week. "Evaluation is not easy. Nor is it popular. But it is essential. All of us share a responsibility to strengthen this important function."

On Dec. 19, 2014, the UN General Assembly adopted the first resolution on evaluation and designated the year 2015 as the International Year of Evaluation.

UNEG is an interagency professional network that brings together the evaluation units of the UN system, including UN departments, specialized agencies, funds and programmes, and affiliated organizations. Its mission includes promoting the independence, credibility and usefulness of the evaluation function and evaluation across the UN system. Currently, it has 45 such members and three observers. Endite