Zlatan Milišić: “Evaluation reminds us we can always do better”
Representative and Country Director for WFP Ethiopia says we need an open mind when it comes to evaluation
The Ethiopia Country Strategic Plan evaluation was recently completed. What is the value of the findings for the country office?
It was very helpful and informative to me. I came at a time when the evaluation was still ongoing, so I learned a lot through consultations with the evaluation team.
The process has been extremely useful. We agreed to all the recommendation, and it strongly shaped our new country strategic plan, helping us understand where we can be more effective and efficient — where to push, and where to pull back.
Importantly, it helped us focus our work more intentionally on food systems, allowing us to be proactive rather than reactive. It guided us in addressing the root causes of food insecurity while maintaining our core focus on saving lives, and also enabling us to protect and change lives in a more sustainable way.
The country office also has a large number of decentralized evaluations, many of them requested by donors. Are there any that stand out as influential?
Yes, we have an unusually high number of decentralized evaluations. I’ve never seen this in any other country I’ve worked in. One that really stands out is the evaluation of our school feeding programme, done under our McGovern-Dole grants. It was eye-opening in terms of how to improve our delivery. The donor was very pleased, and as a result, we received an additional $27 million to continue the programme. It was a powerful evaluation done in a decentralized way.
What advice would you give another country director about the benefit of having dedicated evaluation capacity in Ethiopia?
I hadn’t seen this before coming to Ethiopia — having a full-time evaluation officer reporting directly to management. But I quickly saw the value, especially after seeing how many evaluations were ongoing or in the pipeline. It depends on the country office, or the programme, but in our case, we are seeing increasing requests by donors to do these evaluations for their own programmes. And it is very useful to have someone dedicated to follow up on evaluations, because so many of them overlap, are linked, or inform each other. You can’t do that if you just assign one programme officer to look after that, so we have a very strong overview of what is going on. I certainly get informed much better this way, and our responses are much quicker and to the point.
Can you speak about a general ‘aha’ moment from an evaluation?
I think it’s simple. We can always do better and that’s exactly what evaluation reminds us. We need to take them in with an open mind, not be defensive, because we can all do better, and they exactly tell us that: how to do it better.
I can say that our funding has significantly improved after our evaluation has been completed and our partners, donors, and others, were briefed.
I don’t want to say that it’s because of the evaluation, but it certainly contributed. It cleared our mind where to push more, where to back off, and where to remain consistent in a way that is comprehensive and addresses the broader food system rather than some little activity here or there.
How can we increase the use of evaluations in WFP?
It is important to not be defensive and closed off when we’re having different oversight processes; evidence is important and becoming more and more important every day.
Donors want more evidence; governments need more evidence. We need more evidence as WFP to see what genuinely works and what doesn’t.
What’s the point trying to cover your back when you have done something that was not that effective or efficient? It’s much better to be open-minded and to allow it.
We should have a way of congratulating and rewarding, in whatever way we can, those managers who are open-minded and who are moving these evidence gathering and analysis processes forward. Rather than to pretend that everything is perfectly fine.
So yes, let’s just all open up: gather evidence, present it.
It’s much more powerful for donors to see something backed up by evidence, rather than the rhetoric that’s repeated every month.
