Guidance on country portfolio evaluations in UN Women

The country portfolio evaluation (CPE) approach and methodology has been developed by the UN Women Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) to assess UN Women’s contributions to results at country level while shifting the focus from activities and outputs towards medium/long-term results.

The CPE guidance has been designed to ensure greater rigor, consistency and well-suited methodology in CPEs while providing flexibility to cater to varied contexts and country typologies. The guidance includes three sets of model documents that provide a series of default options for the design of CPEs.

The CPE approach uses the UN Women Strategic Note (multi-year planning tool) as the main point of reference and responds to the triple mandate of UN Women and the specific needs for accountability, learning and decision-making on gender equality and the empowerment of women.

The main audience of this guidance is UN Women staff and evaluators involved in commissioning and managing UN Women CPEs; however, it may also provide useful approaches for integrating gender equality in country-level evaluations being carried out by other evaluation offices.

We hope you find this guidance useful to further bolster evaluation culture and build your capacity to conduct a high-quality, credible and impartial country-level evaluation.