 The Mistress of Ceremonies, Brenda Babour, distinguished members of the IPTED 2.0 consortium, the University of Bern Center for Evaluation, and the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, supporters of the program, the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation, the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. Dear fellow supporters, and most importantly you, the IPTED graduates, good evening. I bring you all the congratulations and good wishes of the IEO, the Independent Evaluation Office of the UNDP, and my own professional network, the United Nations Evaluation Group, where I serve as one of its vice-chairs. I also wish to thank the IPTED Secretariat for the important work, and the visionary Ray Rist and Linda Murroch for starting the IPTED journey way back in 2001, and I was there at the time. The new partnership that you have in IPTED 2.0, as even further gravitas in that the university is concerned, brings substantive evaluation experience and capacity, marked renewal whilst building on the indelible and unmistakable global IPTED brand. As a former IPTED instructor for many years, I have direct experience of how the cause is received and meet alumni across the globe in various forums who talk with pride about being an IPTEDta, as they now work in ministries and departments building oversight systems backed by an amazing IPTED network. You have been privileged to participate in this program and reaching this badge of honor tonight, graduation night. You have been reinscribed or newly minted as an evaluator in a global coveted program. You have shared your experience in a dynamic program and built collective wisdom and knowledge which in the years to come will remain indelible and practical as you draw on who you met as participants who you now call friends. The new consortium resonates very much with my own thinking and the direction being taken by the IEO in its high profile national evaluation capacity building series known as the NEC. A United Nations ship that has and continues to travel across the globe energizing UNDP geographic regions that span 170 countries and territories about the values and virtues of evaluation. The UN see the evaluation to improve the quality of people's lives by aligning promise and intent with practice across the full spectrum of interventions through over 100 UN agencies and related programs. The NEC ship has also gathered momentum from its maiden voyage in the Arab states in Morocco in 2009 from a modest 50 participants to move every two years to another region and have now sailed full circle and will return to the Arab states in October 2019 for round two after a decade. The journey has touched participants from almost the full membership of the United Nations close to 180 countries reaching thousands engaging academia, civil society and the professional networks. The United Nations is critical to the attainment of the SDGs and the United Nations evaluation group has made it a priority to put evaluation on the agenda to build capacity so that governments can report their progress at the high level political forums. Some 40 countries have done so to date and move from a description of monitoring data to an assessment of tangible changes on the ground. The IPTED and our national evaluation capacity conferences are complementary therefore and whilst they work separately in structure and form are two very significant global initiatives that build evaluation capacity and professionalism. I found that the new IPTED 2.0 curriculum focused on more South, new challenges and a larger spectrum of target groups resonates with our own thinking on the NEC. The IPTED brand lives in thousands of graduates each of who is uniquely and collectively a link in the IPTED chain, a chain that girds the globe. In our testing times it is a much needed professional anchor to keep the craft and principles, to remind the principles that we are mission driven and that evidence must trump ego and loud voices in the performance discourse and that when there is a challenge we raise our arguments not our voices. How better to be able to raise the arguments when you are a professional evaluator with the skills, evidence and experience. This evening I have chosen to talk about the values in evaluation as I believe that in the context of fluidity, noise, rough winds and seas it is the anchor that keeps the chain connected and if not addressed can lead to us becoming unhinged in the future. As evaluators we ascribe value we make a professional judgment on past performance which is fundamentally necessary as part of the diagnosis to improve our future. The Wilson Park dialogue which the IEL posted recently focused on just that, revisiting independence, objectivity and the critically reflective role of evaluation in the SDG era. We make judgments. We need to be comfortable with it and we will have confidence if we are properly insulated from influence, have the right reporting lines, budget and power. One cannot be credible and claim to be serving an accountability call if one is reporting to the evaluant. One can if one is reporting to the oversight structures of the evaluant be it a board, council or polygons. The IEO has been successful in enjoying structural, budget-free, behavioral and managerial independence and its work helped by its own IEO brand a strong and high demand for its work. It helps that the administrator Akeem Steiner has affirmed independence and the IEO in his statements and uses the evaluation for steering the UNDP. It also helps that the IEO has an evaluation advisory panel in place to advise its work and audit an evaluation advisory committee to engage with and a board that approves its budget and program of work. The performance question is very political and with declining resources and active citizenry more governments have been called to account than ever before to justify their existence. The stakes are also higher around results in this period as are the politics. We need the credibility to conduct the work and show that indeed we have a value proposition and must take as a constant that our work often is about causing good trouble. The billions and trillions wasted across the globe would have helped global humanity had evaluation be more independent, robust with a more singular focus on ensuring public and corporate sector accountability. More inequalities would have been addressed and through the democratic ethos that evaluation draws on and promotes the values of the UN to which we all subscribe would have been better adhered to. We must recognize that measuring compliance is not necessarily about measuring performance as we all know that any accountability system can be gained. We have seen it with the various crises across the globe in both the public and corporate sector. This is what distinguishes us from other oversight professions. Even though we may not always have the space and recognition we deal with power and do not need to be obliged to validate it. We can ask any questions, I thus caution that whilst technical skills are important there is a very fundamental distinction we must have and that is to be less of a careerist, to be loyal to the evaluation policy. The first identity must be that of an evaluator and then a staff member of the organization in which you work. Our job is to build the evaluation bridge for transparent and accountable conversations between the world of the political and its related leadership and the statements of what will or has happened and the reality of the inevitable discrepancies between policy and results we show up the discrepancies. It is here that the pushback comes whose evidence was truth and in this heated furnace of evaluation communication we can emerge stronger and better forged if we have good methods are coherent to in explaining ourselves as a profession. It would be much more useful if we logically follow on that if evaluation is a judgment it is about accountability and learning can come about in the accountability process with great power comes great responsibility our armor and ammunition is then the principle for which we engage with the principals I share a few of these reflections firstly the principle of exercising the right to judgment independence for transformation I started my professional evaluation life rather naively 23 years ago as the director of South Africa's first monitoring the evaluation directors talks to set up the country's first every direction to ensure land reform was successful it was an era of manjela the first democratic administration new policies new dreams at a time when the euphoria of the country was high and we all thought that good policies and new leaders was ideal to dismantle the apartheid on our order and its insurious structures with the question of land and all that was needed was sound in any system to track progress and ensure that land reform happens we started from scratch developing systems to get and penetrate opaque administrative systems more difficult to the land question where hundreds of years of colonialism and apartheid created a geospatial order that no amount of policy or goodwill could dismantle the value we worked with was evaluation for transformation to bring about change to show citizens how progress was being made and to hold to account and administration that was built on racism and prejudice fear and darkness I recall the contestation the sidelining of the function within the department when senior voices were not happy with the messages and when methods were questioned as the way not to improve but to dilute we are now listening to voices in the evaluation world who say that independence is not important that units need to support learning I am not sure when evaluation became a primary teaching function if so it should be in the et al unit of organizations and not seek to claim to be part of all the sites the definition of evaluation is to make a judgment to generating a dialogue about performance to move forward and improve secondly the value of being self reflective and seeking critique to keep us honest independence comes with responsibility and this means the obligation to seek wise counsel who evaluates the evaluators obviously cannot be the evaluant if it is set up to be given judgment however there needs to be an overarching view of the work of evaluators and this could be in the form of periodic peer reviews I would suggest that a more effective mechanism would be to set up an evaluation advisory panel or light which I set up in 2013 at the independent evaluation office and which provided my office with the collective wisdom of the best evaluation and development minds in the world their task was to do quality assurance methodological guidance strategic directions and focus on development perspectives we benefited from our work being critiqued a better vocab able to keen to global debates and discussions given that the members own formidable experience and gain confidence in how we did our work we just completed a five-year review of the world and found that whilst much progress has been made more needs to be done and they're doing evaluation that scale and speed was necessary but it is essential to manage the quality it is here again that the question of methods comes in how we conceptualize and craft our evaluations how we frame the issues ask the questions which criteria to use what is the evaluation process how we engage and draft results debrief give the right to respond bring in the political and how to write recommendations finally the final value is that of communication but probably the most important value we had Sasha speaking to you about that earlier this week the cost of poor communication is much more than we imagine the wrong messaging at the wrong time not recognizing language nuance being unable to articulate in simple language what we do is often why many evaluations do not get delivered on time to the right audiences we all know about eval phobia it is real that the very words monitoring and evaluation resonates with deep seated fears in the human brain evoking memories of school and university days and causing psychological and physiological tensions this is our business we often whether we like it or not or can control it or not evoke negative sentiment emotions and inevitable defensive behavior i invested time with my iot team engaging in getting us all exposed to brain science how the other side receives what the emotions are and there's much we can learn i've heard many values take the stance that any feedback is defensive and then pull out the yellow or red card in the context of the world cup labeling the evaluate as being defensive and not listening to the virtues of knowledge refusing to be enlightened but by us the all knowing and omnipotent evaluators we have a difficult balancing act and i would thus suggest deep reflection by evaluators of their own communication capability written verbal these are not soft skills and cannot be discounted as unimportant if we invested more engaging evaluation process and obviously still holding to the principles of independence we can engage more effectively we must train to see ourselves and whilst we are often critical of others my professional experience as a manager in many contexts over many years has shown me that evaluators can learn much on how to listen better respond with more empathy and build credibility through greater rapport in conclusion i know the value of dinner and drinks and celebrating graduation and thus will not stand between this fact and you i congratulate you all again and wish you well as you continue to do right things what is right cause good trouble when you need to keep to the principle and with evaluation help us create a better world towards the gender 2030 safe travels the reinscribed and newly mentored hip-set 2018 thank you