13 July 2016: At a side event during the 2016 session of the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF), government officials shared experiences and challenges with using evaluation, stressing priority areas for evaluation in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the potential of evaluation to ensure no one is left behind.

The side event, titled ‘No one left behind: Evaluation in the service of national SDG review mechanisms focusing on gender equality and social equality,’ was organized by the UN Evaluation Group (UNEG) and took place on 13 July 2016, in New York, US.

Participants noted the challenge of explaining evaluation and its usefulness, including to parliaments and civil servants. Natalia Nikitenko, Member of Parliament, Kyrgyzstan, said that after her country’s revolution in 2010, society had “high expectations” of good governance, transparency, and accountability of the government, and she highlighted the role of evaluation in fulfilling these aspirations.

On data and information, Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah, Morocco’s Minister of National Education and Vocational Training, highlighted the need to consolidate information from all relevant departments and agencies, and to keep evaluations and their information very credible, since people will challenge any “bad news” that comes out of an evaluation. Felipe Castro Pachon, Colombia’s National Planning Department, said household surveys have limitations and do not provide enough information to produce all of the SDG indicators. He said administrative records, open data and other sources are needed to fill data gaps.

Gonzalo Hernández Licona, Executive Secretary, Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), said the SDGs are an opportunity for countries to manage development with their own hands, and he called to make evaluation systems more credible, including through credible indicators and monitoring systems. He added that achieving the SDG targets is not about national averages – which are “no longer enough in our world” – meaning that local governments must reduce poverty in their territories. He also called for involving development cooperation in monitoring and evaluation.

Castro said that the SDG indicators allow for measuringprogress, but not causality. He said evaluation allows governments to identify whether their own actions have led to progress on the targets, or if CSOs’ or other parties’ actions were the cause for progress, so governments know what further action must be taken.

The officials also discussed how evaluation can support “leaving no one behind” by going beyond data disaggregation to look at equity, human rights and gender, and whether policies are reaching the most unreachable. Nikitenko highlighted Kyrgyzstan’s gender responsive approach to legislation. Hernández Licona said inclusion will be achieved only when poverty is at zero and Mexico’s main markets include people from all groups – as measured by, for example, the percentage of women in Congress, and indigenous people as CEOs. Castro said Colombia’s evaluations include criteria on interventions for people left behind, such as health care services provided to indigenous people living in the jungle to evaluate whether the services are in accordance with indigenous views and culture. [IISD RS Sources] [Event Details] [IISD RS Coverage of HLPF 2016]