Assessment of development results : evaluation of UNDP contribution : Algeria

"The Assessment of Development Results is one of the main tasks of the Independent Evaluation Office. It seeks to analyse systematically and independently the progress of key UNDP programmes in countries that receive its support. This ADR was carried out in close collaboration with the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), to ensure that the findings are credible and useful, and ultimately appropriated by the national partners. The assessment process was jointly supervised by the Independent Evaluation Office, the UNDP Country Office and the Regional Bureau for the Arab States, and carried out by an independent team, under the guidance of a manager from the Independent Evaluation Office. This approach allowed both the Algerian Government and the Independent Evaluation Office to ensure that evaluation standards, such as independence, impartiality and methodological rigour, were respected. The evaluation team was given access to documents produced by a range of national partners, as well as from various recent exercises such as the 2011 repositioning of UNDP in Algeria, and the 2009 joint assessment for a priority action plan for Algeria. Bringing the national context into the report in this way is useful for national partners and also allows UNDP to organise its work in a more strategic manner. The evaluation shows that UNDP achieved a number of significant results over the assessment period. However, the effectiveness of its work, in terms of expected outcomes or impacts, was only moderately satisfactory. This is because large-scale and sustainable transformations, beyond the expected outputs of initiated projects, were not made. The performance of UNDP was affected by a number of factors, both internal and external, and particularly by the terrorist attack on its premises in December 2007. The recommendations of this report seek to help UNDP improve its effectiveness and its strategic position in Algeria. Having looked at what did and did not work over the last five years, as well as the underlying reasons, the report offers guidelines for the roles that UNDP could play in the future. The Independent Evaluation Office sincerely hopes that the results of this evaluation will allow UNDP to increase and improve its support to the Algerian Government and other national partners, for the human development of the country. We also hope that it will help to establish the future strategy of UNDP and that the recommendations will feed into improvements in the ...