Brief no. 5: OCHA evaluation synthesis report. Occasional Policy Briefing Series

1. OCHA evaluations serve the dual purpose of accountability for performance and results
and learning to inform policy discussions and strategic decisions of OCHA’s senior
management, as well as of other stakeholders. Individual evaluations inform on specific
issues, activities or areas of work, with the aim of contributing to improved performance
and organizational learning.

2. With the present report, however, OCHA aims to go beyond the individual accountability
and learning of a single evaluation. The analysis here presented takes into account all of
what has been achieved, discerned and learnt in each of the evaluations conducted in
OCHA during 2010, and outlines those recurring issues and common themes identified as
repeatedly affecting the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance.

3. By identifying these recurring problems, OCHA intends to enlighten policy directions and
strategic choices to be made by OCHA’s senior management, to inform discussions on
what are the most critical issues that need to be addressed to improve the delivery of
humanitarian assistance, to ensure corporate learning, and to update managers, partners and
all other stakeholders on the insights and lessons learned across all evaluations conducted
during the period of analysis.

4. Evaluations and reviews conducted by OCHA during 2010, and therefore included in this
analysis are the following:

• Review of the OCHA Central Register of Disaster Management Capacities (January,
2010);
• IASC Cluster Approach Evaluation 2 (April, 2010);
• IASC Review of Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA) (June,
2010);
• OCHA Gender Review (September, 2010);
• Inter-Agency Real Time Evaluation (RTE) of the Humanitarian Response to
Typhoons Ketsaka and Parma in the Philippines (October, 2010).
• Inter-Agency RTE on the response to Pakistan Displacements (August, 2010);
• Inter-Agency RTE on the Response to Haiti’s Earthquake (October, 2010);
• Evaluation of OCHA Response to the Haiti Earthquake (December, 2010);
• Evaluation of the Common Humanitarian Funds (CHF) (December, 2010)