Assessment of development results : evaluation of UNDP contribution. Sri Lanka.

"July 2012."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 101-103).

Executive summary -- Introduction -- Development challenges and national strategies -- UN and UNDP responses -- Assessment of UNDP's contribution to development results -- UNDP's strategic positioning -- Conclusions and recommendations.

The Assessment of Development Results (ADR) is an independent evaluation by the Evaluation Office (EO) which systematically assesses progress of key interventions by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in countries receiving its support. The ADR in Sri Lanka is the seventy-fourth assessment conducted by the EO and the twenty-first conducted within the Asia-Pacific region, and the first such evaluation conducted in Sri Lanka. This ADR was conducted jointly with the Government of Sri Lanka with a view to strengthening the ownership of the evaluation results by national partners, and thereby its credibility and utility. For this purpose, a Joint Management Group (JMG) was set up with participation from both the Government and the EO. The JMG provided oversight to the evaluation which was conducted by an independent national team and guided by a professional evaluation manager from the EO. Through this mechanism, both the Government and the EO ensured that established norms and standards for evaluation, such as independence, impartiality and rigorous methodology, were followed. We believethat this joint approach has helped the evaluation team collect inputs from a broad range of national partners and resulted in a report that is soundly rooted in the national reality making it useful for national partners and UNDP in designing their future engagement with a better sense of UNDP's strategic direction. The evaluation found that UNDP had significantly helped the country overcome major challenges that emerged during the last decade. Today, Sri Lanka is looking at a new development path as a middle income country, and UNDP has been seeking to reposition itself to maintain its relevance in the new context. We therefore believe that the evaluation was very timely. Having provided the opportunity to take stock of what worked, and what did not, in the past decade, the evaluation proposes the mostuseful role UNDP can play in the future.