UN system coordination
UN Women supports system-wide coordination on evaluation on gender equality and the empowerment of women by:
Promoting gender-responsive evaluations through the United Nations Evaluation Group
UN Women engages in the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) ensuring that gender-responsive evaluation is mainstreamed across all UN evaluation work in addition to serving as Vice-Chair. UNEG is a professional network that brings together the units responsible for evaluation in the UN system including the specialized agencies, funds, programmes and affiliated organizations.
UNEG provides a forum for members to establish common norms and standards for evaluation, develop methodologies addressing UN concerns, strengthen evaluation functions through peer review and information exchange and establish partnerships with the wider evaluation community. UNEG currently has 43 such members and three observers.
United Nations system-wide action plan on gender equality and women’s empowerment: Systematizing and harmonizing reporting on evaluation
The Chief Executives Board for Coordination developed a UN System-Wide Policy on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (CEB2006/2) that was endorsed in October 2006 as a means of furthering the goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment within the policies and programmes of the UN system. As a response, the UN System-Wide Action Plan for the Implementation of the CEB 2006/2 (UN-SWAP) was developed by UN Women to create a comprehensive accountability framework for gender equality and women’s empowerment in the United Nations. The UN SWAP is composed of 14 performance indicators, including one dedicated to evaluation.
In 2012, the UNEG Human Rights and Gender Equality Task Force further developed a scorecard to report on the UN SWAP Evaluation indicator along with technical notes for its use. The scorecard is a reporting tool organized around 13 scoring criteria and articulated around three headings that capture the overall elements related to mainstreaming gender equality throughout the evaluation process with three scoring levels: evaluation criterion score, evaluation report score and aggregate meta-score. The Technical Note and Scorecard enhance alignment and harmonization of reporting across the UN system.
Inter-agency networks and regional groups
UN Women also participates in and/or coordinates regional UN Evaluation Groups Inter-agency Networks, which promote an evaluation culture and contribute to UN Coherence on evaluation at regional level. Their objective is to strengthen regional evaluation capacities among UN agencies and their partners. At the moment, there are three UN Evaluation regional groups actively promoting evaluation in the regions of Asia-Pacific, East Africa and Latin America: the UN Evaluation Group in Asia and Pacific (UNEDAP), the Nairobi Interagency Evaluation Network (NIEN) and the UN Inter-agency Working Group on M&E for Latin America and the Caribbean.
