"Sales No. E.13.III.B.3"--P. [4] of cover. "January 2013." Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-85).
Contents:
Executive summary -- Introduction -- The global poverty context -- UNDP's strategic response to the global poverty context -- Assessment of UNDP's contribution -- Conclusions and recommendations.
Summary:
Poverty reduction is at the core of UNDP's work and together with achieving the MDGs has remained the top priority of UNDP in the 2000s. In this respect, UNDP plays an important role across all its focus areas, including in democratic governance, environment and energy for sustainable development, and crisis prevention and recovery. The evaluation focuses on the results at the country level across all its focus areas since 2000. It therefore does not attempt to evaluate the extent to which UNDP is a global thought leader in poverty alleviation but rather focuses on the changes that UNDP has brought to people's lives on the ground. The evaluation largely builds upon the evidence from the body of existing evaluations and over 100 were examined covering as many countries. Five country studies supplemented and deepened this analysis. From among the findings, three main messages can be identified. First, the evaluation concluded that UNDP has been an effective partner in supporting the development of pro-poor policies, especially in terms of encouraging national discourse on multidimensional poverty and supporting the development of an enabling environment where national partners can develop such policies. This is clearly an area of strength and more recent initiatives such as the MDG Acceleration Framework are showing further promise in this respect. Second, the evaluation concluded that in order to fulfil the corporate priority of poverty reduction, UNDP must ensure a consistent pro-poor bias in all its programmes. While it is important to continue support to the development of a pro-poor enabling environment across all its focus areas, to meet the MDGs, the poor need to benefit disproportionately from UNDP's interventions Third, the evidence points to the need for strengthening the process of learning about what is working, for whom and in what contexts. Effective learning should be the basis for scaling-up activities and ensuring that lessons from UNDP's interventions feed into policy adaptation. The process should therefore focus on helping national partners learn so that they can utilize this knowledge in the most effective manner. It is important to note that this is one of two global evaluations being presented to the annual session of the Executive Board in 2013 and, for the first time, the management responses to the evaluations are being included in the evaluation reports themselves. I believe that this is an important step to improve transparency and to facilitate utilization of the report. As UNDP prepares to develop a new Strategic Plan, it is evident that it is well positioned to be a lead international organization in the area of poverty reduction. This should be seen against the backdrop of high expectations, a complex development environment and conflicting priorities from multiple funding sources. To move towards an even more effective organization in this area, UNDP will require support from programme countries as well as additional resources and commitment from funders. I therefore hope this evaluation will be useful for UNDP management and members of the Executive Board in strengthening UNDP's role in this top priority.
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