Expansion Partnership 2015 Accreditation
Evaluation Report:
English

In November 2010, based on the recommendations presented in the paper, ‘Broadening of the GEF Partnership under Paragraph 28 of the GEF Instrument: Key Policy Issues, the GEF Council decided that the GEF will initiate an accreditation process for broadening of the GEF partnership. The Council also instructed the Evaluation Office to initiate an evaluation of the accreditation pilot at the earlier of two milestones: (a) two years after the first five agencies have been accredited or (b) January 2015. The aim of the proposed evaluation was to help the Council decide whether to continue accrediting GEF Project Agencies and whether or how the accreditation policies and procedures should be amended.

The accreditation process started in November 2011. However, by January 2013 none of the applicants had fully completed the accreditation process and the conditions for the first trigger would not have been met any time before January 2015. Therefore, the second trigger was applicable to determine the start of the evaluation. In its October 2014 progress report on the pilot on accreditation, the GEF Secretariat requested the Council to consider postponing the start of the evaluation to October 2016, because it would be too early to learn about the effects of the expansion of the GEF partnership. The Council agreed that it is early to assess these effects, but felt that an evaluation focused on the accreditation process would still be useful. The Council therefore requested the IEO to undertake an evaluation of the GEF accreditation process, to be presented at the June 2015 meeting.

The evaluation of the GEF accreditation process is being undertaken by the GEF IEO to respond to the Council's request. Given the revised mandate, the focus of this evaluation is on accreditation process. The key questions of the evaluation are:

  1. To what extent is the accreditation process designed to achieve its intended purpose?
  2. To what extent is the accreditation process fair and transparent?
  3. To what extent has the accreditation process been efficient from the perspective of different stakeholders?
  4. What are the early results of the accreditation process?
  5. What lessons have emerged from the GEF's experience on accreditation?