Jobs
12 May 2025
Short Term Consultant: Specialist/Expert "Methodological guidance for IEO Evaluations"
The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is planning to prepare a common guidance for its evaluations. The guidance will be consistent with international standard and good practices for program evaluation (e.g., OECD-DAC, Multilateral Development Banks and UN Evaluation Group ) but will adapt them to the thematic domain of the GEF-funded interventions and to the specific institutional configuration of the GEF, as a financial mechanism for several international conventions, operating through accredited agencies and with focal points hosted in the countries’ government agencies.
The guidance, while meant for IEO independent evaluations, will be consistent with existing guidance documents for the self-evaluations conducted by the GEF agencies (i.e., guidelines for project-level Terminal Evaluations; guidelines for Program evaluations ; guideline for evaluation of enabling activities ).
Key principles. While the definition of the detailed structure of the guidance document will be discussed as a part of this collaboration, a number of principles can be defined ex ante:
- The Guidance’s primary audience are IEO staff and consultants, as a tool to better prepare evaluation and encourage standardize format and organization of evidence and findings that facilitate synthesis for the quadrennial Comprehensive evaluation of GEF (also known as OPS) or for other knowledge products. Other users of the guidance may include GEF Secretariat, GEF agencies, country partners and evaluation practitioners.
- The Guidance is meant to be a rather agile introduction to GEF evaluation methodology. As such, it will strive to be concise and refer, for further details, to existing manuals, textbooks and publications that offer a more detailed treatment of specific topics.
- IEO may also prepare an online resource website with multimedia sources (documents, videos) that provide specific training to complement the guidance.
- The guidance will provide advice on:
- How to conceptualize an evaluation (formulating key questions, preparing a theory of change or conceptual framework).
- How to operationalize standard evaluation criteria into the GEF context.
- How to prepare a data collection and data analysis strategy.
- Adopting and integrating qualitative and quantitative methods.
- Leveraging opportunities of information and communication technology for evaluation (GIS, Artificial Intelligence applications).
- How to structure an evaluation report (while some flexibility is necessary. some common principles will be important to facilitate evaluation synthesis and evidence extraction from the evaluations).
- How to formulate conclusions and recommendations; (viii) good practices in communicating results, including data visualization.
- The guidance will refer to international ethical standards for evaluation.
- The guidance will include both general advice applicable to all IEO evaluations, as well as advice geared to specific IEO evaluation typologies (e.g., thematic, corporate, country level, multi-country, evaluation syntheses).
- Once the guidance preparation has reached an advanced stage, the guidance will be piloted by IEO and revised according to its implementation experience.
Full details available on the GEF IEO website. Application deadline 1 June 2025
