Evidence use at the core of WFP’s new regional evaluation strategies
With three new faces since June 2022, we caught up with the regional evaluation officers at WFP’s six regional bureaux to hear about their plans, interests and how soon-to-be-released regional evaluation strategies are shaping up.
What will your unit’s regional evaluation strategy focus on?
Jean Providence Nzabonimpa, Regional Bureau Johannesburg (RBJ) — joined as regional evaluation officer in May 2022: We have been discussing with different stakeholders, including the regional evaluation committee members, the strategy’s ability to ensure that evaluation is used more to contribute to Zero Hunger. We generate many evaluations in different thematic areas, and the feeling is that we need to find strategies to make sure that the evidence from those evaluation reports is translated into actions, decisions, policies and new programmes. Secondly, a focus for the region will be enhanced capacity and partnership for evaluation. When we say evidence use, we talk about credible evidence. For us to ensure the evidence is trusted, we need to have strong capacity in-house and access to a pool of expert evaluators who can help us generate credible evidence.
Andrew Fyfe, Regional Bureau Cairo (RBC) — joined as regional evaluation officer in October 2022: WFP’s success in contributing to Zero Hunger by 2030 depends on the careful selection of WFP partners, intentional and forward-looking design of WFP interventions with immediate relief and long-term sustainability in mind, as well as vigilance in managing portfolios of key WFP interventions such as general food assistance, resilience, and cash-based transfers. Working closely with country office evaluation managers and senior decision-makers, and through the deployment of the full toolkit of evaluation approaches, methods and techniques available to UN evaluators, RBC aims to support WFP to generate targeted evidence around the performance and results of its interventions, the functioning of its key partnerships as well as the ultimate results for the women and men, girls and boys living in the most affected communities in the MENA and Eastern Europe regions. We also intend to play an active role in supporting regional and national partners to build ever more effective and inclusive national and regional evaluation systems to ensure that the evaluation profession can play a full role in helping MENA governments and societies meet the full objectives of the SDGs.
Mari Honjo (Regional Bureau, Bangkok) — joined as regional evaluation officer in July 2022: We would like to focus on the use of evaluation, supporting the development of regional evidence value chains and knowledge bases for evidence-based decision-making to achieve Zero Hunger. We will also focus on partnerships with colleagues in the regional bureau and country offices, and other stakeholders.
Claudia Schwarze, Regional Bureau Dakar (RBD): The core focus of the next generation regional evaluation strategy is facing externally. The first strategy focused on the evaluation function setting up their internal processes, guidance and support systems to ensure quality evaluations and related regional bureau services. Now that this is in place, we can engage with key stakeholders outside of the evaluation function. On the one hand, this includes promoting evaluations and building evaluation capacity beyond the regional evaluation unit, both inside WFP and together with young evaluators and governments. On the other hand, we focus on ensuring evaluations are useful and used to contribute to our mandate of achieving Zero Hunger.
Nikki Zimmerman, Regional Bureau Nairobi (RBN): For RBN, evaluation use is the core focus of the forthcoming regional evaluation strategy. The foundations for evaluation use are built from the planning stage through to dissemination. Armed with quality evidence, country offices and regional units can improve programming and more effectively advocate for what works and what doesn’t to achieve Zero Hunger.
Natalia Acosta, Regional Bureau Panama (RBP): A main focus of the new RBP regional evaluation strategy is the emphasis on promoting evidence use and ensuring that evidence reaches the right people at the right time. In the framework of the new strategy, we will continue to produce evidence summaries to inform country strategic plan formulation processes, and use these evidence summaries to inform strategic regional planning processes (for example, technical regional workshops).
Describe your unit in three words?
Jean Providence (RBJ): Partnerships. Progressive. Learning.
Andrew (RBC): (Highly) professional, (Very) committed and (Rather) busy!
Mari (RBB): Flexible, amicable, professional
Claudia (RBD): We add value
Nikki (RBN): Dynamic, fast-paced, [many] opportunities
Natalia (RBP): Dynamic, committed and fun
What are you looking forward to in 2023?
Jean Providence (RBJ): We are looking forward to the second phase of the emerging evaluator programme. We completed the foundational phase this year, and in 2023, working with CLEAR-AA, we will work on the consolidation phase with three of the six evaluators. We want to challenge them to learn and contribute to data and evidence visualisation and storytelling and rope them in to evidence use experimentation and measurement. We’re also excited to apply the principles of social marketing for evidence use. The private sector is very good at that, and we want to use similar strategies for social good, using the four P’s of marketing. It is about packaging evaluation evidence into specific, audience-friendly products, post them in a place where they are easily available and accessible and promote them so that all audiences are aware of the types and nature of evidence available. For the last P — price — it’s not always monetary. The time it takes a reader or decision-maker to find the specific evidence they need, comes at a price. We want to minimize this cost, and create a depository of all evaluation datasets and evidence.
Andrew (RBC): Since joining the UN in 2010, my main responsibilities as the Head of Evaluation at UNCDF and, since 2020, Vice Chair of the UN Evaluation Group have focused on ensuring that evaluation functions can best serve the oversight and strategic learning requirements of decisionmakers, typically working at headquarters levels, both in and outside the UN. At the same time, in order to be fully effective, it is incumbent on UN evaluation functions to ensure that the realities and the very many challenges of the communities and individuals that the UN seeks to serve are understood and represented in their work. As the new regional evaluation officer in Cairo and working very closely with my RBC and country office colleagues, with the active support of the Office for Evaluation, I’m looking forward to positioning the evaluation function closer to the communities and individuals that WFP serves. In doing so, we hope to ensure that our WFP colleagues and our key partners will have ever greater access to credible and relevant evaluative evidence to help them make effective decisions around the design and implementation of WFP activities.
Mari (RBB): I look forward to communicating with colleagues in different country offices and from regional bureau units, and learning from them more about operations and countries.
How does your unit plan to promote evidence use?
Natalia (RBP): We are systematically producing country evidence summaries to inform country strategic plan formulation processes, and organizing evidence sessions at the beginning of the formulation workshops. We are also officially starting with our evidence use repository or log — a repository of examples of how evidence from centralized and decentralized evaluations have been used in our region.
Claudia (RBD): Through strategic evidence planning — together with the research, assessment and monitoring (RAM) team, we plan to conduct structured consultations with country office and regional bureau programme teams on each country's strategic plan. This will allow them to identify both country and regional evidence needs so that evaluations address those priorities and RAM contributes with a sound data basis.
Decentralized evaluations are one of the best means to produce evidence tailored to country office needs. At the same time, they put a heavy burden on country office resources and the utility beyond a certain country office is often perceived as limited. Two strategies in 2023 will be key to addressing this:
- Promote summaries and synthesis of evidence as tools to pull together information across countries and package them to be useful and easily accessible to all WFP operations
- Identify opportunities to bundle evaluations in the region, producing a body of evidence across several country offices, and reducing the resource burden, while still ensuring individual results are available where pertinent
Nikki (RBN): In the region, one newer initiative is regional evaluations. These seek to provide more strategic evidence and learning across multiple countries in the region for subjects that lack evidence. Thus far, evaluation subjects have and are focusing on more operational and forward-looking topics, such as cooperating partnerships, supply chain, local and regional food procurement, and food systems. To help promote the use of these evaluations, the region has also begun experimenting with integrating more visuals into the process, such as visual summaries of key findings, to both help stakeholders digest and understand the content of evaluations and more effectively disseminate their results.
