As Delivered

Excellencies, Distinguished Members of the Executive Board,

Let me open on behalf of UNDP management with great and sincere appreciation to Director Isabelle Mercier and her team at the Independent Evaluation Office for their leadership in revising the UNDP Evaluation Policy, as well as for everything else they do every day of the year. The revised policy reflects a collaborative and inclusive process, incorporating the findings of the 2025 independent review, extensive consultations with Regional Bureaux and Country Offices, and constructive engagement between IEO and UNDP management.

The revised Evaluation Policy comes at a pivotal moment for UNDP as we deepen our focus on results, impact, and learning. Together with the new Results-Based Management Strategy, the revised policy represents a strengthened foundation for accountability, strategic learning, and evidence-based decision-making across our development portfolio.

Let me highlight the key areas of progress:

1. Stronger Alignment with the Resource-Based Management (RBM) Strategy:

The policy is now closely aligned with the revised UNDP RBM Strategy launched earlier this year. This alignment strengthens our ability to demonstrate results and learning, enhances strategic planning, and improves the quality of our development outcomes.

2. Introduction of a Theory of Change:

For the first time, the Evaluation Policy includes a Theory of Change, which provides a clear framework to guide our evaluation efforts. It will sharpen the strategic focus of evaluations, inform resource allocation, and improve the utility of evidence in shaping programmes and policies that deliver transformational impact.

3. Renewed Emphasis on Strategic and Thematic Evaluations:

The revised policy rebalances our evaluation portfolio, placing greater emphasis on strategic and thematic evaluations that go beyond project outputs. This shift enables us to generate cross-cutting insights, enhance institutional learning, and better capture long-term development impact, which is very much necessary to capture during implementation of the new strategic plan, which is much more based on portfolio and systems thinking in that sense.

4. Enhanced Quality and Use of Decentralized Evaluations:

The quality of decentralized evaluations has improved significantly—from 21% rated satisfactory or highly satisfactory in 2019 to 50% in 2024. Building on this progress, the revised policy places renewed emphasis on the planning, quality assurance, and use of decentralized evaluations. 

Excellencies and distinguished delegates,

Evaluation is a cornerstone of UNDP’s accountability to you, the Executive Board, our partners, and the people we serve. The revised Evaluation Policy reflects our collective ambition to ensure evaluations are not only credible and independent, but also timely, useful, and strategically aligned with our mandate.

Again, I want to thank the Independent Evaluation Office for its leadership and the excellent collaboration throughout this process. UNDP management looks forward to working closely with the Board and IEO to ensure the effective implementation of the new policy in the years ahead.

Thank you very much.