National Evaluation Expert

Background

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls, the empowerment of women, and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women's rights at the center of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. 

The  Country Office (CO) Strategic Note (SN) is the main planning tool for UN Women’s support to normative, coordination and operational work in Türkiye.  

UN Women Türkiye has been at the forefront of support for Türkiye’s continuous commitment to implement international norms and standards on women’s rights, and the enhancement and implementation of relevant national legal and policy frameworks. The CO has been operational in Türkiye since 2012. This evaluation will consider the Strategic Note covering the period 2022-2025. The current Strategic Note will end in December 2025, and a new Strategic Note is due to be developed starting on 2026. 

The  UN Women Turkey Strategic Note 2022-2025 (SN) outlines the strategy for promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in Turkey during this period. The Strategic Note is linked to the UN Women Global Strategic Plan 2022-2025, National Development Plans 2021-2023 and 2024-2028 and country-level UNSDCF 2021-2025.  

The SN seeks to address the country’s main development and women’s empowerment-related priorities, as articulated in the 11th National Development Plan (2018-2023), 12th National Development Plan (2024-2028) and the Women’s Empowerment Strategy (2018-2023), and it is grounded in the standards, principles and obligations of the Convention to Eliminate all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, Concluding Observations of the Commission on the Status of Women, SCR 1325, Sustainable Development Goals 

SN has been developed in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework 2022-2025 (UNSDCF). UN Women contributes to three UNSDCF outcomes: 1) Women and girls have improved and equal access to resources, opportunities, and rights, and enjoy a life without violence and discrimination; 2) By 2025, Persons under the Law on Foreigners and International Protection are supported towards self-reliance. 3) By 2025, governance systems are more transparent, accountable, inclusive and rights-based with the participation of civil society, and quality of judicial services is improved. 

As framed in the SN, UN Women has focused on 3 main priority areas in the 2022-2025 and carried out programmes and projects in partnership with the government institutions and civil society through the synergy of five key functions: technical assistance, advocacy, knowledge generation and management, coordination, and programming. For more information please see Brochure: Strategic note 2022–2025 Türkiye. 

In this regard, UN Women CO will procure the services of a National Evaluation Expert to support the Country Portfolio Evaluation of the UN Women Turkey Strategic Note 2022-2025.

The National Evaluation Expert will be reporting to Programme Specialist, and will work together with the Regional Evaluation Specialist and two International Evaluation Experts as an evaluation team responsible for conducting the Country Portfolio Evaluation. The evaluation team will be supported by Monitoring and Reporting Analyst, who will be the point of contact on the contract and payment issues. 

Description of Responsibilities/ Scope of Work

1. Purpose of the Country Portfolio Evaluation 

 Evaluation in UN Women is guided by normative agreements to be gender-responsive and utilizes the entity’s Strategic Plan as a starting point for identifying the expected outcomes and impacts of its work and for measuring progress towards the achievement of results. The UN Women Evaluation Policy[1] and[2]and Ethical [3] 

The Country Portfolio Evaluation (CPE) is a systematic assessment and a means to validate the contributions made by UN Women to development results with respect to GEEW at the country level. It focuses on the portfolio of interventions carried out by the Country Office to fulfil UN Women’s triple mandate and their overall success in advancing gender equality in the country. It is also an assessment of the CO’s organizational effectiveness and efficiency in delivering the planned results. It uses the Strategic Note (including the DRF and OEEF) as the main point of reference and provides a comprehensive evidence-based picture of UN Women’s contributions to development results by moving away from project-level evaluations towards a more strategic country-level evaluation.  

As a high-level strategic evaluation, the CPE is primarily intended to be a formative (forward-looking) evaluation to support the CO and national stakeholders’ strategic learning and decision-making, including evidence-based advocacy, when developing a new Strategic Note. The evaluation is expected to have a secondary summative (backward looking) perspective, to support enhanced accountability for development effectiveness and learning from experience.   

It is a priority for UN Women that the CPE will be gender-responsive and will actively support the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment. 

The primary intended uses of this evaluation are: 

1. Learning and improved decision-making to support the development of the next Strategic Note. 
2. Support accountability for development effectiveness in terms of UN Women’s strategic contribution to gender equality and women’s empowerment. 
3. Learning on effective, promising and innovative strategies and practices 
4. Better understanding the mission and vision of UN Women at the Country level 

The internationally agreed standard evaluation criteria developed by the OECD DAC namely Relevance, Coherence, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Human Rights and Gender Equality and Sustainability will be used in the CPE with the following objectives. 

CPEs have seven objectives: 

1. Assess the relevance of UN Women contribution to the intervention at national levels and alignment with international agreements and conventions on gender equality and women’s empowerment. 
2. Assess effectiveness, organizational efficiency and coherence in progressing towards the achievement of gender equality and women’s empowerment results as defined in the Strategic Note.  
3. Enable the UN Women CO to improve its strategic positioning to better support the achievement of sustained gender equality and women’s empowerment.  
4. Analyse how human rights approach and gender equality principles are integrated in the design and implementation of the Strategic Note.  
5. Identify and validate lessons learned, good practices and examples of innovation that can be scaled up and replicated to support gender equality and human rights. 
6. Provide insights into the extent to which the UN Women has realized synergies between its three mandates (normative, UN system coordination and operations). 
7. Provide actionable recommendations with respect to the development of the next Strategic Note. 

 A more detailed guideline for criterion and key evaluation questions will be provided to the consultant upon the commencement of consultancy.

2. Scope and limitations of the evaluation 

The CPE covers the implementation of the UN Women Türkiye CO SN 2022-2025; however, considering the final evaluation report needs to be timely ready to inform the CO’s next SN planning process, the period assess by this will be 2022 - 2024 and the plans for 2025. The CPE will assess the implementation of the threefold mandate of UN Women in Türkiye during this period, including general support to normative policy, UN coordination and programmatic work which will be considered in relation to the thematic areas established by the UN Women Strategic Plan 2022-2025. 

The evaluation team is expected to establish the boundaries for the evaluation, especially in terms of which stakeholders and relationships will be included or excluded from the evaluation. These will need to be discussed in the Inception Period. 

 The evaluation is expected to consider the main cultural, religious, social and economic differences when analysing the contributions of UN Women.  

 3. Evaluation design (process and methods) 

The evaluation will be based on gender and human rights principles and adhere to the UNEG Norms and Standards (2016), the UNEG Ethical Guidelines (2020) and  UN Women Evaluation Policy and Handbook. 

The evaluation will be employing a non-experimental, theory-based[4] approach. The performance of the country portfolio will be assessed according to the theory of change stated in the Strategic Note 2022-2025. The evaluation is expected to reconstruct the theories of change using a participatory process during the Inception Phase of the evaluation. This should be based on feminist and institutional analysis. The evaluation will apply Contribution Analysis (CA) to assess the effectiveness of UN Women’s country portfolio. This will use a model template to be provided to the evaluation team. 

Within the scope of the CPE, a case study is selected focusing specifically on the Implementation of Gender Responsive Budgeting and Planning in Turkey Project. The implementation period is between 15 December 2020 and 15 December 2024 and it aims to empower women and further strengthen gender equality ecosystem in Türkiye through systematic and sustainable integration of gender perspective at all stages of national and local policymaking and budgeting processes. The project is implemented by UN Women Turkey in collaboration with the Ministry of Family and Social Services (MoFSS) - Directorate General on the Status of Women (DGSW) and the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey - Presidency of Strategy and Budget (PSB). Please see https://equalbudgeting.org/home for more information on the project and also the GRB developments in Türkiye. The evaluation team will provide a brief report on the selected case study as an annex to the main evaluation report and the case study report is expected to have Background, Approach, Findings (as per the evaluation criteria set for the CPE), Lessons Learnt and Conclusions sections. 

The evaluation is particularly encouraged to use participatory methods to ensure that all stakeholders are consulted as part of the evaluation process. At a minimum, this should include participatory tools for consultation with stakeholder groups and a plan for inclusion of women and individuals and groups who are vulnerable and/or discriminated against in the consultation process. The evaluation is encouraged to use the following data collection tools: secondary documents analysis, surveys, interviews, focus group discussions and observations.  

 4. Stakeholder participation 

The evaluation team should ensure participation of stakeholders during the evaluation process, with a particular emphasis on rights holders and their representatives considering limitations imposed by the pandemic which may limit the ability to ensure engagement of stakeholders as per normal practice. 

Stakeholders should include: 

1. Target groups, their households and community members; 
2. Programme and project partners; 
3. National government institutions; 
4. Internal UN Women stakeholders; 
5. Civil society representatives; 
6. Private sector representatives; 
7. Political leaders and representatives; 
8. Donors and development partners; 
9. UN Country Team members and key staff from UN sister entities; 

5. Management of the evaluation  

The evaluation process will be led by UN Women Independent Evaluation Service and the management structure for this evaluation will include: 

1. ECA Regional Evaluation Specialist (RES), who is a member of the UN Women Independent Evaluation Office, will be the evaluation team lead and the task manager for this evaluation and will be supported by the UN Women Georgia CO M&E Focal Point during the evaluation process. 
2. Evaluation team comprises team lead (ECA RES) and independent external evaluation consultants (two international and one national) will ensure independency of the evaluation process.  
3. Evaluation Management Group for administrative support and accountability will include: Country Representative, M&E Focal Point; ECA RES (who will lead the group); 
4. External Evaluation Reference Group to foster stakeholders’ ownership and participatory approach; CSOs, state partners; development partners (including donors); representative of the UNCT. 
5. Internal Evaluation Reference Group integrated by all UN Women BiH CO personnel and key RO staff, including Planning and Coordination Specialist, to foster ownership of the process and use of its results by the CO’s personnel. CO personnel are expected to be closely engaged during the entire evaluation process; personnel will be consulted during the inception and data collection phases of the evaluation (all personnel are expected to participate in the inception workshop and in the presentations of the preliminary findings and the final report). Regional Director and key ECARO personnel will also be invited to join the final presentation of the evaluation.  
6. Since this is an independent evaluation service led evaluation, Independent Evaluation and Audit Service leadership will review and endorse inception and final report and will issue the final report.  

Deliverables

The National Evaluation Expert is expected to provide key contextual information and perspective to design a robust utilization-focused CPE. The national expert is also expected to support the in-country data collection process.   

 Support the team lead to design the Evaluation methodology including evaluation data collection tools    

• Support the team lead to facilitate participatory inception workshop and in drafting of the inception report    
• Under the supervision of the team lead, collect virtual/in-situ field visits for data collection    
• Coordinate and communicate with evaluation stakeholders, including for exit briefs and evaluation preliminary findings validation meetings etc.    
• Contribute towards the draft synthesis evaluation report and final evaluation report including annexes, ensuring all feedback from the ERG and EMG is integrated and tracked for transparency.   

 The national evaluation expert will provide inputs to the following deliverables which will be jointly developed by the evaluation team. The  estimated total number of days to be invested by the evaluator will be 25 days for all listed deliverables below. 

1) Inception report: The development of the inception report will commence with the access to the secondary data sources to be compiled by UN Women and inception meeting to be held with the UN Women CO staff. The evaluation team will present a refined scope, a detailed outline of the evaluation design and methodology, evaluation questions, and criteria for the approach for in-depth desk review and field work to be conducted in the data collection phase. The desk review of background documentation and the inception meeting with EMG will be completed and the data extracted from these resources will be incorporated into the inception report.  The report will include an evaluation matrix and detailed work plan. A first draft report will be shared with the evaluation management group and, based upon the comments received the evaluation team will revise the draft. The evaluation team will maintain an audit trail of the comments received and provide a response on how the comments were addressed in the final inception report.   

2) Data collection, data analysis and presentation of preliminary findings: The evaluation team is expected to review additional documents, conduct data collection.  A PowerPoint presentation detailing the emerging findings of the evaluation will be shared with the evaluation management group for feedback. The evaluation team will incorporate the feedback received into the draft report. 

3) A draft evaluation report: A first draft report will be shared with the evaluation management group for initial feedback. The second draft report will incorporate evaluation management group feedback and will be shared with the evaluation reference group for identification of factual errors, errors of omission and/or misinterpretation of information. The third draft report will incorporate this feedback and then be shared with the reference group for final validation. The evaluation team will maintain an audit trail of the comments received and provide a response on how the comments were addressed in the revised drafts. 

4) The final evaluation report: The final report will include a concise Executive Summary and annexes detailing the methodological approach and any analytical products developed during the course of the evaluation. The structure of the report will be defined in the inception report. The final evaluation will include an appendix on the case study of the Implementation of Gender Responsive Budgeting and Planning in Turkey Project as explained under section 2.4 Evaluation Design. 
 

All deliverables shall be received and cleared by the UN Women. All reports shall be presented in English, in electronic version.