United Nations

Progress To Strengthen U.N. Internal Evaluation Systems Has Been Slow Gao ID: NSIAD-87-54 January 14, 1987

GAO provided information on: (1) the United Nations (UN) headquarters' progress in strengthening internal evaluation; and (2) U.S. efforts to monitor and promote the evaluation and to assess UN development programs.

GAO found that: (1) several specialized UN agencies are making progress in establishing internal evaluation capabilities by integrating evaluation findings into their programming, budgeting, and management processes; (2) the UN headquarters, regional commissions, some major departments, and some semi-autonomous organizations have made little progress in developing strong internal evaluation capability; (3) UN has not rapidly implemented provisions in its 1981 and 1983 resolutions that would strengthen headquarters evaluation units and systems capabilities; (4) the Central Evaluation Unit (CEU), established in 1985, does not have adequate personnel or resources to perform its tasks, including conducting evaluations, formulating evaluation policies, procedures, and program feedback, and establishing self-evaluation guidelines; (5) UN planned to make temporary arrangements to provide more support to CEU and proposed that it emphasize self-evaluation by program managers; and (6) the United States promoted the 1981 resolution to strengthen internal evaluation and continues to promote the improvement of evaluation mechanisms and conduct independent assessments of various agencies' development assistance programs.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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