 At its 129th session, the program committee requested that the Office of Evaluation conduct a real-time evaluation of FAO's COVID-19 response and recovery program. The evaluation was launched at the end of January 2021 and covers FAO's COVID-19 responses that have been grouped under the program, from the onset of the pandemic to date, irrespective of budget source or geographic location. The evaluation assesses the progress made and provides feedback to foster organization-wide learning, inform decision-making, and promote accountability. The evaluation is being conducted in various phases, and this presentation covers good practices and lessons learned emerging from program implementation, specific to the humanitarian response and the provision of knowledge products and data services in support of recovery efforts within the COVID-19 pandemic context. The evaluation adopted a consultative approach, including creating core learning groups of key internal stakeholders to serve as a sounding board, validate findings, and assist in the uptake of the good practices and lessons learned. In a mixed methods approach, the evaluation collected data through document reviews, interviews with and questionnaire to stakeholders, and additionally to obtain greater insights on knowledge products and data services, alt-metric and cyber-metric analysis were conducted. Grouped under overarching criteria, the good practices and lessons learned provide insights into FAO's response to the pandemic. What follows is just a sample of those identified, covering two of the criteria, relevance and coherence. The good practices and lessons learned identified emerged from specific contexts and care must be taken in not overgeneralizing their scope and applicability. Although the reports elaborate on the various contexts, some important points to consider include the crisis affected both beneficiaries and FAO personnel, the importance to reduce risks for all stakeholders, and the operational constraints faced. In terms of increasing the relevance of its response, defining strategic objectives early on proved critical. Senior management stressed the need to prevent that the health crisis became a food crisis, adopting a systems perspective of the agri-food chain and applying lessons from previous crisis that showed the need to anticipate and address the continuity of the food supply chain. Likewise, protecting livelihoods and mitigating gender-based violence while following containment measures to prevent further transmission of the virus was also stressed. Some existing monitoring, early warning and information sharing systems proved to be an effective way to provide relevant information on the global crisis situation. Similarly, conducting joint assessments with partners enabled the pooling and leveraging of expertise, resources and networks for a wider coverage and a more timely and intersectoral assessment and response. A good practice related to coherence was the response of management to the crisis so as to foster technical teams and personnel at headquarters and in the decentralized offices to work as one FAO, increasing horizontal and vertical cross-collaboration in the development of knowledge products and data services. A lessons learned pertaining to coherence was that the crisis situation made it difficult to devise how to synergize different types of knowledge products in order to create bundles that would target more comprehensively specific categories of end users. As such, it was clear that the pandemic posed a number of unforeseen challenges that affected the development of knowledge products and limited the extent of their dissemination. The final component of the real-time evaluation will identify examples of results that can be attributed to the program. A number of country case studies will also be conducted. The criteria used to select the countries will include program coverage and geographic representation among others. OED will consult with regional offices throughout the process.