Advanced Message for the Global Impact Evaluation Forum 2025
Colleagues, partners,
Our goal is to create alliances for successful action. This necessitates a fundamental change: integrating impact evaluation (IE) as a strategic compass for real-time navigation instead of viewing it as a recurring audit of the past.
Linking Evidence and Action: From Feedback Loops to Reports Better feedback systems, not better reports, will increase the connection between evaluation and decision-making. Three procedures need to be institutionalized by the UN and its partners:
Light-touch, embedded IE units: Within programmatic arms, such as humanitarian clusters or nation platforms, small, committed teams use predictive analytics and quick mixed methods to evaluate hypotheses during implementation rather than after.
Decision-Based Costing: requiring a specific, significant budget line for adaptive management and real-time evidence gathering in every significant program proposal. As a result, evidence becomes an essential part of the program rather than an afterthought.
Leadership Dashboards: Going beyond narrative reports, these dynamic, data-visualization tools allow executives to view the "vital signs" of a portfolio and make course corrections by comparing key impact indicators versus theory-of-change milestones.
Localizing Evidence: Inverting the Credibility Hierarchy The implicit hierarchy that favors exterior "rigor" over local relevance must be dismantled in order to represent local goals and contexts.
Co-Design from Inception: Local stakeholders, including governments, community leaders, and CSOs, must collaborate to create the assessment questions and define "impact" in their particular context. This is shared ownership, not consultation.
Make Local Analytical Ecosystem Investments: Funding and collaborating with regional institutions, think tanks, and data science collectives is the most sustainable approach to localizing evidence. This preserves intellectual capital domestically, increases capacity, and guarantees language and cultural nuance.
Adopt Pluralistic Approaches: RCTs are important, but we also need to give systems mapping, participatory action research, and qualitative approaches with a cultural foundation equal weight. The "gold standard" is the one that provides the most urgent local solution.
Encouraging UN Reform: A Group "Evidence Compact" By functioning as a cohesive, system-wide profession, the impact evaluation community can serve as the catalyst for coherence and cost-effectiveness.
Standardization is not the same as common standards: Create a UN System-wide "Evidence Compact"—a concise consensus on shared platforms for meta-analysis and principles (such as open data, ethics, and quality thresholds). By doing this, we can compare what works across sectors and eliminates repetition.
Pooled Evaluation Funds: We should establish pooled funds at the regional or thematic level rather than having each agency commission tiny, dispersed studies. Larger, more strategic, cross-mandate assessments that address intricate, system-wide issues like social protection or climate adaptation are made possible by this.
A "What Works" Knowledge Platform: A single, easily available, and well-curated digital platform that links findings from UNICEF's education RCTs, UNDP's governance evaluations, UNHCR's protection analysis, and WFP's food security research. In doing so, agency-specific evidence becomes a public good of the UN.
Linking Evidence Throughout the Nexus: Make the Intersections Mandatory The goal of alignment in humanitarian, development, and peace efforts is to require careful investigation at their intersections rather than to harmonize objectives at their core.
Support and Assess "Triple Nexus" Pilots: Impact evaluations that expressly target initiatives that aim to bridge two or all three pillars must be jointly designed and funded by agencies. The main inquiry is: "Do integrated approaches yield greater sustainability and resilience impact than sequential or parallel efforts?" Establish Nexus IE Fellowships: Impact evaluation experts should be rotated throughout UN agencies (for example, from FAO to OCHA to DPPA). This creates a group of experts who are proficient in several mandate "languages" and capable of creating assessments that track results along the peace, development, and humanitarian spectrum.
Adopt a Resilience Lens: Focus evaluation questions on enhancing system and community resilience. This offers a unifying paradigm that is pertinent to peacebuilders (social cohesiveness), development actors (chronic vulnerability), and humanitarian responders (shock absorption).
To sum up, creating evidence partnerships for successful action involves creating a networked learning system. It necessitates changing our investments from isolated research to networked learning infrastructures, from hiring experts to expanding local ecosystems, and from directing group adaptation for common objectives to proving attribution for individual projects. Instead of calling for additional evidence, let's end this discussion with a pledge to create the channels, platforms, and collaborations necessary to provide the appropriate evidence to decision-makers—from UN country teams to community councils—in a timely manner. I'm grateful.
RE: Global Impact Evaluation Forum 2025: Forging evidence partnerships for effective action
Ethiopia
Hailu Negu Bedhane
cementing engineer
Ethiopian electric power
Posté le 12/12/2025
Advanced Message for the Global Impact Evaluation Forum 2025
Colleagues, partners,
Our goal is to create alliances for successful action. This necessitates a fundamental change: integrating impact evaluation (IE) as a strategic compass for real-time navigation instead of viewing it as a recurring audit of the past.
Better feedback systems, not better reports, will increase the connection between evaluation and decision-making. Three procedures need to be institutionalized by the UN and its partners:
The implicit hierarchy that favors exterior "rigor" over local relevance must be dismantled in order to represent local goals and contexts.
By functioning as a cohesive, system-wide profession, the impact evaluation community can serve as the catalyst for coherence and cost-effectiveness.
The goal of alignment in humanitarian, development, and peace efforts is to require careful investigation at their intersections rather than to harmonize objectives at their core.
Support and Assess "Triple Nexus" Pilots: Impact evaluations that expressly target initiatives that aim to bridge two or all three pillars must be jointly designed and funded by agencies. The main inquiry is: "Do integrated approaches yield greater sustainability and resilience impact than sequential or parallel efforts?"
Establish Nexus IE Fellowships: Impact evaluation experts should be rotated throughout UN agencies (for example, from FAO to OCHA to DPPA). This creates a group of experts who are proficient in several mandate "languages" and capable of creating assessments that track results along the peace, development, and humanitarian spectrum.
To sum up, creating evidence partnerships for successful action involves creating a networked learning system. It necessitates changing our investments from isolated research to networked learning infrastructures, from hiring experts to expanding local ecosystems, and from directing group adaptation for common objectives to proving attribution for individual projects.
Instead of calling for additional evidence, let's end this discussion with a pledge to create the channels, platforms, and collaborations necessary to provide the appropriate evidence to decision-makers—from UN country teams to community councils—in a timely manner.
I'm grateful.