EnCompass conducted a corporate evaluation of UN Women’s Regional Architecture. UN Women’s mandate is to progress efficiently and effectively toward the goal of achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. The Regional Architecture decentralized UN Women’s structure, establishing six regional offices, six multi-country offices, and transforming 15 existing sub-regional offices into either regional, multi-country, or country offices.  EnCompass’ evaluation assessed the relevance, organizational effectiveness, and administrative efficiency of the Regional Architecture in delivering its mandate across operational work, normative support, and UN coordination.

The evaluation included reviewing over 300 documents, conducting six country case studies, as well as a portfolio review of 32 additional regional, multi-country, country and programme presence offices, and a global survey of UN Women staff. EnCompass worked in a highly participatory and collaborative process with UN Women’s Independent Evaluation Office, including multiple brainstorming meetings to construct useful, practical, forward-looking recommendations.

By using an appreciative, collaborative, utilization-focused approach, the evaluation resulted in many important successes: UN Women’s Senior Management started implementing recommendations prior to the final report completion, the Deputy Director for UN Women noted in a recent article that it was “the best corporate evaluation UN Women has conducted”, and when the evaluation was presented to the UN Women Executive Board, 23 countries spoke in appreciation of the evaluation.

A write-up of the results of this evaluation was featured in UN Women’s Independent Evaluation Office TRANSFORM magazine. You can find a link to this edition at this link.

Photo c/o United Nations Photo via Creative Commons