By: Madeleine McKinnon, Consultant, GEF IEO

When COVID-19 was discovered in Malaysia, it affected a GEF project supporting reduction in greenhouse emissions across building infrastructure in the health and hospitality sectors (UNIDO GEF ID:4878). Site visits to industrial facilities were immediately halted as social movement was restricted countrywide. Subsequently in July 2020, restrictions began to ease after the first wave, but the longer-term effects of the economic downturn were beginning to take hold. Enterprises such as hotels were unwilling to invest in…

We live in a rapidly changing world although we don't always notice it as our lives unfold in the midst of these changes. Only when you think back, even only a few years, to a specific time and you compare how life was then, do you notice how different it is now. I had this epiphany when I worked on the new revised edition of Evaluating Environment in International Development. The book was originally published in 2014—only seven years ago—so I was somewhat surprised and distinctly pleased when the publisher approached me for an update. At the time of its publishing, the book had…

Blog co-author: David Todd

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the attendant Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) all recognize the close interlinkages of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. The pandemic that we're living through demonstrates this in a concrete and drastic manner. Not only has the pandemic caused a health crisis, it has wreaked havoc on the global economy and revealed huge social clefts in societies. Moreover, the corona virus causing the pandemic is zoonotic and its emergence has been facilitated by the unsustainable…

Project sustainability- the continuation of benefits after project support has ended- receives a lot of attention in the GEF partnership, and rightly so. Creating lasting benefits is the ultimate goal of development work, and a higher bar to reach than delivering on planned project outcomes. But evidence of the actual sustainability of project benefits is also hard to come by, because monitoring systems typically end with a project. For this reason, evaluations traditionally rely on predictions of likely sustainability of outcomes as when project support ends, based on the risks to…

The year 2020 has been defined by the COVID-19 pandemic that has disrupted lives and livelihoods everywhere around the world. The way we work has been interrupted and altered. This is true for those working to advance and manage international environmental projects and programs – it is also true for the professionals working to evaluate for effectiveness and impact of those initiatives. At the GEF Independent Evaluation Office (IEO), the body I lead, we have had to innovate in our data collection and analysis to counter the travel and other limitations posed by the situation. The fact that…