Adapting evaluation questions to the COVID-19 pandemic
Resource date: 10 Feb 2021
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed global health and socio-economic devastation of an unprecedented magnitude. In 2020, UNFPA programmes were adjusted to respond to emerging needs and to ensure a sustainable recovery from the crisis, across development, humanitarian, and fragile contexts. With these changing realities, evaluators must rephrase evaluation questions and subsequent analysis to ensure integration of COVID-19 related issues, with the aim of ensuring UNFPA evaluations continue to provide the highest relevance and quality of evidence on UNFPA performance and its response and adaptation to the crisis.
UNFPA Evaluation Office’s latest guidance on adapting evaluation questions to the COVID-19 pandemic details how to adapt evaluation areas of inquiry and evaluation questions in order to assess the extent to which UNFPA has adapted its interventions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensure an equitable and sustainable recovery. This requires adapting areas of inquiry for assessing the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and coordination, and sustainability of country programmes and other interventions. Within each of these evaluation criteria, the evaluation should assess whether disadvantaged population groups have been reached and with what results.
This resource should be read together with the guidance on how to adapt evaluations to the COVID-19 pandemic, which details how to adjust the conduct and management of evaluations during the pandemic, in line with the local context.
