Blog co-author: David Todd

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the attendant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) all recognize the close interlinkages of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The pandemic that we're living through demonstrates this in a concrete and drastic manner. Not only has the pandemic caused a health crisis, it has wreaked havoc on the global economy and revealed huge social clefts in societies. Moreover, the corona virus causing the pandemic is zoonotic and its emergence has been facilitated by the unsustainable…

Project sustainability- the continuation of benefits after project support has ended- receives a lot of attention in the GEF partnership, and rightly so. Creating lasting benefits is the ultimate goal of development work, and a higher bar to reach than delivering on planned project outcomes. But evidence of the actual sustainability of project benefits is also hard to come by, because monitoring systems typically end with a project. For this reason, evaluations traditionally rely on predictions of likely sustainability of outcomes as when project support ends, based on the risks to…

The year 2020 has been defined by the COVID-19 pandemic that has disrupted lives and livelihoods everywhere around the world. The way we work has been interrupted and altered. This is true for those working to advance and manage international environmental projects and programs – it is also true for the professionals working to evaluate for effectiveness and impact of those initiatives. At the GEF Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), the body I lead, we have had to innovate in our data collection and analysis to counter the travel and other limitations posed by the situation. The fact that…

Blog co-author: Hur Hassnain, Senior Evaluation Advisor, European Commission DEVCO/EES

The presentation titled Geospatial, location, and big data: ‘Where have we been and where can we go?‘ organized by the…

Blog co-author: Hur Hassnain, Senior Evaluation Advisor, European Commission DEVCO/EES

Evaluations in contexts that are not easily accessible, constantly changing, and unpredictable, for example, the situation posed by the current global pandemic, are challenging and call for special considerations. Now that in-person interactions with respondents becoming impossible, we would like to illustrate the use of satellite data that can be applied for remote evaluations of development and humanitarian interventions. "The use of geospatial data analysis is particularly…