No one left behind.

Evaluating SDGs with an equity-focused and gender-responsive lens

 

 

High-Level event: Tuesday, 15 March, 3-5pm followed by reception

Technical event: 16-17 March

Location: New York, USA

 

Organizing Agencies:  EvalGender+, United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG) and the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of UN Women, in collaboration with EvalPartners, Global Parliamentarians Forum for Evaluation, International Organizations for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Coneval Mexico, the Government of Switzerland and the Government of Sri Lanka.                                        

 

A strong call for review and follow-up mechanisms that will “leave no one behind”

 

With the launch of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015, the review of national-level implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the adoption of the UN General Assembly Resolution on evaluation capacity building (A/RES/69/237) and the celebration of 2015 International Year of Evaluation, as well as the World Humanitarian Summit taking place in May 2016, the global community has a significant opportunity to continue bringing evaluation to the forefront of the new sustainable development goals.

 

The new 2030 Agenda shapes the sustainable and equitable development discourse and action for the next 15 years. To meet the central imperative of ‘leaving no one behind’, the SDG’s follow-up and review mechanism aims to monitor and evaluate progress for all. Among the 9 principles that will guide the SDG review and follow-up mechanism, there is an explicit mention on the need to:

• use data that “will be rigorous and based on evidence, informed by country-led evaluations and data which is high-quality, accessible, timely, reliable and disaggregated by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migration status, disability and geographic location and other characteristics relevant in national contexts”;
• enhance capacity-building support for developing countries, including the strengthening of national data systems and evaluation programmes;
• develop processes that are  people-centered, gender-sensitive, respectful of human rights and have a particular focus on the poorest, most vulnerable and those furthest behind.

In line with the SDG follow-up and review mechanism, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action also calls for strengthening accountability mechanisms for gender equality, including of national gender equality mechanisms, national human rights institutions and regulatory bodies.

 

Towards a framework to evaluate SDGs with an equity-focused and gender responsive lens

 

In the last decade, the global evaluation community has been developing evaluation approaches that are equity-focused and gender-responsive. With the SDG calling for “leaving no one behind”, a new opportunity (and challenge) is raising to strengthen even further national evaluation capacities to evaluate localized SDGs and national development policies/strategies with an equity-focused and gender-responsive lens. 

 

In this context, this event seeks to start a multi-stakeholders dialogue to develop an evaluation framework that will facilitate the above-mentioned national evaluation capacity processes. The event is composed of two parts:

 

• a High-Level Event to engage delegates from member states, international organizations and CSOs in a global discussion to identify strategies for building an enabling environment to evaluate the SDGs with equity-focused and gender-responsive lens;
• a Technical event to  start the process of establishing a common framework to evaluation SDGs with  equity-focused and gender-responsive lens. It will include sessions looking at the relevance of the new metrics and agreed indicators; understanding the complexity of SDGs and the power of partnerships; discussing strategies to strengthen gender responsiveness of national Evaluation systems, as well as the demand for and use of evaluation with an equity-focused and gender responsive lens in policy making.