16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the ... - Development

Administrative Issues 59
specific tools existed for it. The World Bank had convened seminars and conferences on
the issue inviting academics from different universities with no satisfying results. The
World Bank then asked whether a roster of all host institutes could be created.
197. WHO stated that all agencies present agreed that fellowships were an important tool
to build capacity but could not go beyond evaluations at the level of the individual and
produce evidence of that assumption. WHO conducted an internal audit of the fellowships
programme in 2004 which concluded that the absence of an established evaluation
framework made it difficult to measure impact. Following that audit, WHO’s
Senior Management proposed that the Fellowships Programme should explore possible
mechanisms to measure the impact of its fellowships programme. WHO cited
the Joint Inspection Unit report of 1998 entitled “Fellowships in the United Nations
system” in relation to capacity building:
198. “To assess the contribution of United Nations system fellowships to capacity building, it is therefore
not enough to take only into account -as it is often the case- the total number of awards or
total expenditures but to go beyond these criteria “by proxy” and measure their real impact, a
difficult if not impossible task for many reasons.” 22
199. Contrary to the UN Joint Inspections Unit study and many others, WHO considered
it possible to measure impact even though it had not found any precedent at that
moment. In this regard, three suggestions were highlighted. Firstly, most of the UN
agencies should improve their fellowship evaluation from the perspective of organizational
impact beyond the current satisfaction assessment by the fellow. Secondly, many
evaluation reports pointed out the difficulty of measuring fellowships impact. Impact
evaluation, however, remained of great concern to all UN agencies. Thirdly, WHO
suggested creating a task force in collaboration with UN/DESA and other Organizations
to tackle the establishment of a framework to measure impact with a common
methodology, regardless of the nature of the fellowships programme.
200. WMO fully endorsed WHO’s proposal to come up with a task force and added that
even though external consultants might be hired, agencies ought to retain the leading
role at all times since they had already the insight into these programmes.
201. DESA added that the first step of the task force would be to come up with a framework
since not all agencies could apply the same indicators. As to the question of ownership,
the recipient countries were responsible for formulating their objectives against which
the outcome would be measured. Measuring the outcome went in line with the resultbased
budgeting (RBB) approach of most agencies.
202. WHO underlined that the initiative for studies on effectiveness should come from the
agencies. Donor countries were interested in the results of their investment not only in
terms of figures but also in terms of impact. Since evaluating impact was such a complex
exercise, all parties had to be involved: the fellows, the funding agency, the UN
22 The report of the Joint Inspection Unit is available at: http://www.unjiu.org/en/reports.htm#2004 (cf. paragraph 38, p. 11)