The Evaluation Report commends the relevance of the project in strengthening Planning and Budgeting processes from a gender perspective, further acknowledging the critical role played by UNW in building the capacities of the organizations traditionally disengaged in the national budgeting process. The Evaluation further commends UN Women’s approach to capacity building as a strategic investment in ensuring institutionalization and sustainability of GRB interventions in the region. The Report on the other hand makes a few critical observations on the design of the intervention. Given the nature of the Evaluation, the Senior Management and the Project Implementation Team observe the inability of the Evaluation to respond to critical focus areas listed in the TOR, including the assessment of financial parameters that was proposed in the ToR. While it was expected that the Evaluation would generate recommendations on improving national Budgeting and Accounting systems, most comments point to larger operational issues in the modus operandi of the UN system, an area that was not intended to be a focus subject for the purpose of this evaluation. It is also noteworthy that most conclusions observed in the Evaluation are not strongly supported by evidence. Detailed comments and course corrections were given by the Asia Pacific Regional Office Evaluation Specialist on the inception report, however were not followed through by the Evaluator. While the methodology was revised in the inception report, based on the comments provided by the Regional Office, the final evaluation report illustrates that the revised methodology was not adequately implemented. The UN Women MCO is working on integrating some of the useful insights that emerged in the Evaluation on the mainstreaming of gender issues in national budgeting and planning processes.
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