UNICEF Evaluation Quality Oversight System

UNICEF’s establishment of a Global Evaluation Quality Assurance System to ensure that evaluations managed or commissioned by UNICEF meet high quality standards has its roots in the Global Evaluation Compact endorsed in 2009, which commits the Evaluation Office and the Regional Offices to collaborate in strengthening UNICEF’s evaluation function. UNICEF developed the Global Evaluation Report Oversight System to achieve four main objectives: i) To provide senior managers with a clear and succinct independent assessment of individual evaluation reports; ii) To strengthen internal evaluation capacity by providing feedback to commissioning offices with practical recommendations to improve future evaluations and to inform their own assessment of the performance of external consultants who might be hired for future evaluations; iii) To report on the quality of evaluation reports through a review and assessment process whose results are communicated to senior management; and iv) To contribute to corporate knowledge management and organisational learning, by providing the evidence base for a meta-analysis of good quality reports. Universalia was mandated by UNICEF to administer the GEROS quality assurance system, to ensure that reporting across UNICEF offices is consistently of good quality, and high credibility and utility. The assignment involves four main components: the establishment of a senior project team; facilitation of a training event for reviewers; the review and rating of final evaluation reports; and a global meta-evaluation of trends of reports reviewed and of the review process.