Annual Report on the evaluation function 2024
Resource date: 04 Jun 2025
The 2024 Annual Report on the evaluation function details the performance of UNFPA's centralized and decentralized evaluation efforts, highlighting key accomplishments, innovations, and areas for improvement and growth.
The UNFPA evaluation function continued to demonstrate a strategic, relevant, agile and innovative approach, aligned to the 2024 Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review and Pact for the Future. The 2024 Evaluation Policy brought improvements, enhancing evaluation independence, quality, and coverage. Key changes included rebranding the Evaluation Office as the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), strengthened decentralized evaluation capacity, and a deeper focus on humanitarian evaluations. The IEO also pioneered the ethical use of generative AI in evaluation, piloting this approach in significant exercises, while shaping the global discourse on AI within the evaluation community.
Furthermore, the IEO continued to enhance its collaborations with United Nations entities and cultivated strong multi-stakeholder and intergenerational partnerships. As recognition for its significant efforts to meaningfully engage young people in evaluation, the IEO received the Youth in Evaluation Super Champion award in 2024.
The UNFPA evaluation function maintained a strong performance in 2024, achieving or exceeding targets for eight out of ten key performance indicators. The implementation of centralized evaluations continued at 100%, with over half (59%) being joint or inter-agency initiatives. Even with a more rigorous quality assessment system in place, every centralized evaluation and 91% of regional and country programme evaluations received at least a 'satisfactory' rating. While the management response submission rate decreased to 89%, the implementation of management responses reached a record high of 98%.
Despite significant progress, key areas of growth remain such as strengthening decentralized capacity for evaluation management and quality assurance, bolstering humanitarian evaluation capacity, and ensuring the timely completion of country programme evaluations.
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