Evaluation Quality Assurance and Assessment: Tools and Guidance

The UNFPA Evaluation Quality Assurance and Assessment (EQAA) system has two basic elements to ensure quality of evaluations at UNFPA – quality assurance and quality assessment. With the purpose of promoting quality throughout the evaluation process, quality assurance takes place during the evaluation, beginning with the evaluation terms of reference and ending with the draft final evaluation report. Quality assessment takes place after an evaluation is completed (ex post), whereby the final evaluation report is quality assessed by an external independent assessor.

UNFPA Evaluation Office rolled out a revised EQAA system in 2016, which included an update to the criteria in the quality assessment grid (used to assess final evaluation reports) and the development of templates for quality assurance, namely templates for the terms of reference and the design report of UNFPA country programme evaluations. In 2019, an updated version of the Evaluation Handbook: How to Design and Conduct a Country Programme Evaluation at UNFPA was launched, providing additional methodological guidance on integrating gender and human rights in evaluation and evaluating in humanitarian contexts.

The revised EQAA system is closely aligned with the Evaluation Policy (2019) and the updated UNEG Norms and Standards for Evaluation (2016), and covers two main types of evaluations: centralized evaluations conducted by the Evaluation Office and decentralized programme level evaluations (namely country and regional programme evaluations).

In 2020, an updated guidance on Evaluation Quality at UNFPA (principles and their application) was rolled out together with the revised Evaluation Quality Assessment Grid. These editions include disability inclusion dimensions in line with the 2020 Guidance on disability inclusion in UNFPA evaluations.

Evaluation Quality Assessments (EQAs) are posted alongside the corresponding evaluation report on the Evaluation Database.

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