The United Nations is embarking on a bold reform agenda.
As part of the larger UN80 Initiative calling for a more coherent humanitarian system, UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s recent report, Shifting Paradigms: United to Deliver provides a “six-step blueprint to deliver faster, leaner and more accountable support to people in crises”.
Three of the six identified action areas resonate strongly with the WFP Office of Evaluation’s vision for evidence partnerships:
- Strengthening country leadership with better data: Empower national leaders to coordinate humanitarian efforts using shared, reliable data.
- Clarifying roles to reduce duplication and increase impact: Define clear responsibilities among agencies to avoid overlap and deliver with greater efficiency.
- Scaling up common services: Expand shared systems and resources to cut costs and speed up humanitarian operations.
Building on the vision for partnership
These actions for UN Reform support the fifth outcome of WFP’s 2022 evaluation policy: Partnerships that contribute to a strengthened evidence environment for UN coherence, which include joint and system-wide evaluations, and government partnerships to strengthen national evaluation capacity.
The principle of partnership is therefore not new to WFP’s Office of Evaluation, but it certainly receives timely momentum with the reform agenda, as a mechanism to ensure we arrive at a more agile, unified, and cost-effective UN system.
One area where this vision finds particular relevance, is our work in impact evaluation. Since the launch of WFP’s impact evaluation strategy in 2019, WFP’s impact evaluation unit has been implementing 31 completed and ongoing impact evaluations across 25 countries, delivering useful evidence to WFP decision-makers and its partners.
From the onset, a key focus of the strategy was working together on shared evidence agendas for humanitarian and development settings. To this end, WFP hosted the inaugural Global Impact Evaluation Forum in Rome in 2023, to spark conversation on pooling resources, identifying evidence gaps and aligning priorities. In the spirit of partnership, WFP and UNICEF jointly organized the second Impact Evaluation Forum in 2024, at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
And this year, in partnership with BMZ and Norad, WFP is returning to Rome for the third Global Impact Evaluation Forum, with a theme speaking to this very topic : “Evidence partnerships for effective action”.
The strength and challenge of collective evidence generation
The readers of this blog need little convincing in the value of rigorous evidence to support the reform agenda. If we are to deliver more coherently and effectively for the people we serve, we must strengthen how we generate and use evidence.
Yet generating evidence in isolation will not be enough. To truly transform how the UN learns and delivers, we must generate and use evidence across agencies, mandates, and contexts.
This will close evidence gaps to ensure that decision-makers have access to the most relevant and timely evaluations. Cooperation also brings clear practical benefits: it avoids duplication, reduces costs, identifies shared priorities across agencies, and supports joint fundraising – ensuring that donors and governments see coherence, and not competition, in our efforts.
Is it realistic?
Of course, establishing and maintaining sustainable evidence partnerships come with challenges, but it is achievable.
Impact evaluations require stable, well-funded programmes over time. To work collaboratively, they would require a shared understanding among partners of what exactly an impact evaluation requires in terms of programme size and longevity to deliver useful data.
Secondly, partnerships only work when all parties are engaged. In the current context, no UN organization can carry the burden of generating all the evidence the system needs; together it is feasible, but partners need clarity on contribution, roles and responsibilities.
And lastly, to be effective, evidence partnerships must focus on shared priorities that serve the wider UN system, not just individual institutional agendas. When evidence responds to issues that cut across mandates – rather than advancing the interests of a single agency – it builds trust, balance, and a sense of collective ownership. Without this alignment, partnerships risk becoming fragmented and short-lived.