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

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16th Meeting of Senior Fellowships Officers of the United Nations System and Host Country Agencies
agency, the host institution, and most importantly, the beneficiary country. Impact of
national capacity-building could only be measured on a national level. WHO agreed
that countries were not involved actively enough in the evaluation process.
203. DESA endorsed the idea of a task force that would come up with tools to evaluate the
impact of the fellowships programmes. However, that did not mean that the task force
would actually conduct the evaluations. InWEnt stated that it might be useful to include
national placement and supervising agencies in the task force. They had considerable
experience in the evaluation of fellowships programmes. InWEnt volunteered to
participate in the task force, if needed. The World Bank suggested that it was important
to discuss the format of the future task force.
204. Ms. Karen Gladbach from WHO/PHAO added that coming up with an impact evaluation
methodology was a big exercise and would qualify for a PhD project. Therefore,
the task force could team up with a scholar working on that subject.
205. Following these discussions, the Secretary of the Meeting proposed a draft text stating
that the Meeting recommended the creation of a Task Force whose terms of reference
would be to develop a proper evaluation methodology.
206. Mr. Hutchings from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization
(ANSTO) raised the issue of how to define success in capacity-building which might
differ in each agency. In his opinion, the proposed Task Force would have to answer
that question before coming up with tools to actually measure that success.
207. UNESCO endorsed the setting up of a Task Force which would come up with a general
framework for evaluation.
208. WMO explained that it already had benchmarks included in its application form as
outlined in the ‘Manual on Policies and Procedures of WMO Fellowships’. A copy of
the WMO Manual was distributed to all the participants.
209. DESA added that it was implementing a new fellowships programme where governments
were required to indicate what they expected from the fellows they were nominating
and what the fellows were expected to do upon return. That made it easier
to follow up on the fellows after their training had ended. The UN Department of
Disarmament Affairs (DDA) considered it important that the task force did not loose
sight of the concrete and detailed questions of evaluation mechanisms and did not get
carried away in theoretical and philosophical debates.
T. Presentation on the 2004 Global Review of Stipend Rates,
by Ms. Lulu Del Rosario, UN Conditions of Service Section
210. Ms. Del Rosario took the floor to present the global review of stipend rates which
had been conducted over the past two years and had resulted in the review of 59 submissions
received from the original 159 countries with already established fellowships
stipend rates. She noted that there was an increase in fellowships stipend rates in 39