The UN evaluation meeting has vowed to act as soon as it completes the essential preliminary task of defining action, a process expected to last until nobody in the room can remember why it was summoned.
Fifty four UN agencies and seven observers met to improve evaluation across the system. By lunch, they had agreed that nothing counts as impact until a consultant has made it difficult to read aloud.
“We are not avoiding decisions,” said Dr Clementine Outcome Fog of the Panel for Verifiable Impressions. “We are protecting them from the reputational risk of being wrong in public.”
Impact has been located
Delegates considered a metric for measuring whether metrics had been measured. It passed immediately. No one could explain what it had done, which the group accepted as proof of independence.
A rival table proposed measuring changed lives. Members rejected this as dangerously ambitious because changed lives do not come with a standard colour for PowerPoint.
Lessons securely mislaid
The meeting then launched a knowledge sharing exercise. Each agency placed its lessons on a separate portal behind a password that expires before the welcome email arrives. This prevents anyone mistaking access for an outcome.
Lunch received the most rigorous analysis. Soup met delivery targets. A missing bread roll became a pilot scheme. The catering budget won praise for demonstrating the scale of unmet need.
Next steps carefully postponed
By Friday, participants approved a forty six page framework. It calls for two baselines, a peer review and another meeting. That meeting will decide whether this meeting helped, after first agreeing what “helped” means to people paid not to.
The dashboard already says “data pending”. Officials called it an early warning that somebody may eventually need another dashboard. A steering group will next decide whether data has feelings.
Read the real story: WHO’s report on the UN evaluation meeting.
