Giving Compass' Take:

• Lisa Frantzen delivers action items toward measuring our effectiveness around the Sustainable Development Goals.

• Among the key elements are commitment, inclusivity, and a willingness to share data. How can international aid groups and other organizations step up their efforts in these areas?

• Learn why small businesses can (and should) do more to align with the SDGs.

What can we do to effectively evaluate progress towards the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

    1. We need to get better at evaluating more complex interventions. Since the SDGs address complex social and environmental problems, the solutions require complex and multi-stakeholder interventions.
    2. Governments need to be committed to evaluation use. With countries prioritizing which SDGs are most urgent for their own contexts and taking on their own approaches to SDG interventions, governments need to play a proactive role in establishing how and when they will use evaluation.
  • We need to develop evaluation capacity globally for SDG evaluation. Given the expansiveness of the SDGs, the complexity of the social and environmental issues addressed, and the often fragile environments in which the interventions are taking place, evaluators need a range of skills both technical and human-centered.
  • Sharing evaluation learnings across regions can be tremendously helpful. Understanding local context is critical for both effective SDG interventions and effective evaluation of those interventions.
  • Participatory and inclusive evaluation is crucial. In order to live up to the standard set by the SDGs of “leaving no one behind” evaluation needs to help stakeholders obtain a clear understanding of target populations. This requires disaggregating data to include relevant vulnerable groups and integrating program or policy participants’ voices through participatory evaluation.
  • Evaluators need to continue to share what works in fragile and conflict environments. The conference provided an opportunity for many evaluation practitioners to share their experiences working in areas of fragility and/or conflict.
  • Evaluation needs to continue to be promoted as a tool for learning and decision-making. Evaluation is making the move globally from accountability to learning and we can do more to help facilitate that transition. We can compare our evaluations in order to learn about new approaches that might be tried in our own contexts.

Read the full article on the Sustainable Development Goals by Lisa Frantzen at TCC Group.