Evaluation and the 2030 Agenda e-learning
"We must ensure the SDGs help transform the lives of people around the world. Words must be turned into impactful action. This will not happen without accountability, evaluation and learning."
-- United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is an unprecedented global endeavour that requires transformative leadership and a bold new approach. The Agenda recognizes the critical role of evaluation in informing global and national leaders of the best way to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and will require efforts to further strengthen evaluation practices, in developing and developed countries alike. The aspirational nature and interconnectedness of many of the Agenda’s goals will require those conducting and commissioning evaluations to have a thorough understanding of the Agenda and its goals, targets and indicator framework; different approaches to evaluation, such as performance-based v. system-based approaches; as well as equity and human-rights based approaches.
The Evaluation and the 2030 Agenda course is a free, moderated course delivered jointly by EvalSDGs and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). The update of the module was supported by a grant from EvalPartners/IOCE.
The overarching objective of the course is to develop evaluation capacities to support the voluntary national follow-up and review processes of the 2030 Agenda.
Following completion of the course, participants will be able to:
- Describe why evaluation is important in the context of the SDG era.
- Identify the challenges and opportunities for the development of national evaluation policies and systems and to effectively conduct follow-up and review processes towards achieving the SDGs.
- Analyze options to generate stronger evidence for the follow-up and review processes and for contributing to better decision-making to accelerate the achievement of the SDGs.
- Be able to apply tools and practices to build capacity for evaluation in the context of the SDGs.
The course explores the strategies, critical methods and approaches, and examples of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) systems that mainstream the 2030 Agenda in Country Systems. It promotes the need to use of evaluation to contribute to critical national priorities and discusses the practical aspects of evaluation capacity development, commissioning of evaluations and communicating evaluation results for decision-making.
The course consists of a self-paced e-learning course with moderated forum activities and follow-up learning reinforcement. Over two weeks, the course is delivered online and includes an objective knowledge assessment to measure learning, and discussion forums which are integrated into the course to promote interaction and exchanges among participants and course moderators. As a follow-up to the online course, learners will receive further material and guidance to reinforce learning and facilitate application of knowledge and skills.
The course targets government officials and parliamentarians and other experienced and new leaders from a broad audience, including evaluation commissioners and practitioners of evaluation, policy and planning, from developing and developed countries, and from public, private, non-profit and academic sectors. The course also targets staff of the United Nations and other international organizations. In accordance with the 2030 Agenda’s principle of reaching the furthest behind first, applicants from countries in special situations, comprised of the least-developed countries, the landlocked developing countries and the small island developing States are encouraged to register. Women are strongly encouraged to apply too.
Please note the following additional information:
The course moderation will be delivered by a team of three experts working in the field of evaluation and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Additional information including bio profiles of the resource persons can be accessed here:
Dr. Dorothy Lucks is the Executive Director of SDF Global Pty Ltd. For the last 30 years, Dr. Lucks has independently evaluated development policies and programmes and projects of international organizations such as the AfDB, FAO, IFAD, UNHCR, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank in over 32 countries. Dr. Lucks is Co-Chair of the EVALSDGs Network which is a network of policy makers, institutions and practitioners who advocate for the evaluability of the performance indicators of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and support processes to integrate evaluation into national and global review systems. Dr Lucks has a PhD focusing on multi-stakeholder relationships in sustainable development and provides technical support to sustainable development programs in Australia and internationally. She is strongly focussed on innovation and sees the SDGs as an opportunity and global driving force for transformation.
Asela Kalugampitiya is a Sri Lankan lawyer and he has been working in the M&E field for over 20 years particularly on national evaluation policies systems. He has worked for international organizations including International Development Law Organization (IDLO), UNICEF, UN Women, United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and International Labor Organization (ILO) as Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist. Asela was instrumental in launching International Year of Evaluation 2015 and organizing Global Evaluation Forum held at the parliament of Nepal and parliament of Kyrgyz Republic. He was also instrumental in initiating parliamentarians’ movement promoting evaluation culture: Global Parliamentarians Forum for Evaluation. The first ever parliamentarians evaluation forum was held in Colombo in Sep 2018 with participation of over 250 delegates from over 70 countries where parliamentarians committed for the Colombo Declaration. He has worked as the (honorary) Director- Center for Evaluation, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka. He is a member of the teaching faculty of the Post Graduate Diploma in Evaluation course run by the same university.
Kieron Crawley has over twenty five years’ experience in the development sector working with International Development Agencies and country experience covering Central and South America, Asia, Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. After completing a Masters´ degree in Public and Development Management at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, he joined university staff as a Senior Lecturer and delivered modules to Diploma and Master´s level students in Political Economy of Development and Results Based Monitoring and Evaluation. In addition to practicing as an academic and a professional evaluator, Kieron’s work has included providing technical support to African governments in the establishing of National M&E systems, capacity building of parliamentarians in the use of evidence for oversight and the convening of international dialogues to promote the use of evaluation evidence for national decision making. Kieron is currently a Visiting Research Fellow and Technical Specialist at the Centre for Learning on Evaluation and results Anglophone Africa (CLEAR AA), which promotes the use of evidence (from evaluation) in policy making across 17 African countries.
Online course technical requirements:
Browser: The online course is best accessed with Firefox 3.6 or higher; compatible with Google Chrome, Javascript and Cookies must be enabled. Internet Explorer is not recommended.
Software: Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Office or Open Office
Platform: Windows 95, 98, 2000, NT, ME, XP or superior, MacOS9 or MacOSX.
Hardware: 64MB of RAM, 1 GB of free disk space; Modem: 56K
Certification: Participants successfully completing the course requirements, including the end of module assessments and actively taking part in the forum discussions, will be entitled to a Certificate of Completion. Participants not successfully completing the online course but meeting other programme requirements will be entitled to a Certificate of Participation. Certificates will be issued jointly by EvalSDGs and UNITAR.