Evaluation Plan:

2018-2022, Palestine

Evaluation Type:

Final Project

Planned End Date:

07/2022

Status:

Cancelled
Justification: As the Center will first start its operation in 2022, it was agreed with the donor to move the evaluation to the beginning of 2023. The evaluation will moreover take a form of a review of the sustainability plan, the national counterparts capacity to take over, and UNDPs future support function. Due to the sensitivity of the assessment this will not follow the normal evaluation procedure and therefore not included in the public evaluation plan. As we had to terminate the contract with the original evaluator, below is some consideration and lessons learned: Reference is made to the Midterm Evaluation of Support to Industrial and Agricultural Economy through JAIP ICT and Incubation Center Development, which was commissioned through Human Resource and Development (HRD) on 8 March 2021 but was terminated in August 2021. UNDP/PAPP has raised and discussed several concerns on the performance and quality of HRD’s approaches in data collection and their deliverables, as detailed in the “Notice Letter – Performance and Deliverables” delivered to HRD on 3rd August 2021. Main concerns focused on the evaluation team’s inadequate evaluation capacity and expertise and their inability to deliver within agreed upon deadlines, which led to several complaints in the data collection. The firm was notified several times of the poor performance and inability of the evaluation team to meet deadline, despite the support provided by UNDP RBM team in the development of the inception report and evaluation tools. Nevertheless, the firm failed to meet the requirements of the final notice given to them. To promote sharing experiences, we, hereby, summarize the main lessons learned of this process as follows: - Clear distinction shall be made on the expertise of the consulting firm and the evaluation team. Although reference check result was positive on the selected firm which also submitted previous good work, there’s a need to check also on the evaluation team, mainly the lead evaluator. - While the evaluation team may have solid technical experience in the subject of the evaluation, the proposed team might have inadequate evaluation expertise. Therefore, it’s crucial to verify that the at least the lead evaluator is having a solid evaluation experience and expertise. - Even through CVs are stating English written and spoken proficiency, the quality of the evaluation might be highly influenced by lack of language qualifications, why UNDP/ PAPP will include in all ToRs a requirement of a professional language review of the final draft. - As a result of the above, it’s important when asking for a sample previous works, they must include some previous works of the lead evaluator.

Management Response:

No

Evaluation Budget(US $):

30,000