Evaluating the work of multilateral organizations’ response to COVID-19: emerging lessons and good practices from FAO’s early response

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Programme (RRP) in July of 2020 with the aim of enhancing its coordination in response to the crisis and its related resource mobilization. Conceived as an “umbrella programme”, it includes a range of initiatives, projects and activities related to FAO’s response in seven priority areas ranging from humanitarian response to long-term recovery and agri-food systems transformation.[1]

In this blog, we outline the emerging lessons and good practices identified by the Office of Evaluation (OED)’s real-time evaluation (RTE) of the RRP in its interim report released in October 2021 (https://www.fao.org/evaluation/highlights/highlights-detail/en/c/1445582/). These refer to two specific areas of work: FAO’s humanitarian response and COVID-19 knowledge products and data services, which formed the bulk of FAO’s early response (March 2020-March 2021). Nevertheless, they could be of relevance for similar humanitarian, normative and knowledge-based work conducted by multilateral and bilateral agencies engaged in COVID-19 relief.