Summary Report on WFP Follow-up to Evaluation Recommendations

Following the preparation of WFP’s evaluation policy, presented to the Board in October 2003, and discussions in WFP concerning the importance of learning, the Office of Evaluation felt the need to address the question of the usefulness of its evaluation recommendations and the follow-up action undertaken in response to them. Consultants were commissioned to study the follow-up actions taken and to make recommendations to improve the effectiveness of evaluation in the broader sense.
WFP’s 2003 evaluation policy is based on the twin pillars of accountability and learning. However, in the period 2000–2002 covered by this study, the majority of evaluations managed by the Office of Evaluation consisted of project evaluations, with the recommendations being mainly addressed to managers in the field. This study therefore focuses on the learning pillar. It is to be noted that with the introduction of WFP’s new evaluation policy, many project evaluations will be decentralized. The Office of Evaluation will focus on thematic evaluations and on evaluations of large projects and programmes. Its recommendations will include not only practical recommendations addressed to fieldmanagers but, increasingly, recommendations requiring corporate attention and accountability.
In this context, the most prominent conclusion of the study is that WFP can be satisfied that the Office of Evaluation contributed to the WFP knowledge base through generating acceptable recommendations for project and policy improvement: 95 percent of the sample of recommendations had been accepted and 88 percent were implemented or being implemented by mid-2004.
The study provides a number of recommendations that are specific to evaluation recommendations. A summary of these findings and recommendations is presented in Section III. In addition, it provides insights and suggestions for improving the evaluation process as a whole, which are presented in Section IV.