Background

The parliamentarians’ movement for evaluation has rapidly grown in past few years. Particularly between 2014-2015, regional parliamentarians’ fora were created in Africa, East Asia, Latin America and MENA regions. The first ever parliamentarians forum; The Parliamentarians Forum for Development Evaluation (PFDE) was established in South Asia in early 2013. This was a historical milestone as the first time in the history parliamentarians raised their voices to advocate for national evaluation policies and to commit to put evaluation at the core of the agenda at the country level. Thereafter parliamentarians were featured in many international evaluation events for promoting national evaluation capacities. In this vein, one of the key milestones is the study on “Mapping Status of National Evaluation Policies” which was conducted by PFDE with support from EvalPartners. Also PFDE conducted a regional consultation in South Asia on national evaluation policies where all eight countries in the region prepared action plans.

African Parliamentarians Network on Development Evaluation (APNODE) was initiated at the AfrEA conference held in Yaounde, Cameroon in March 2014 after one year of initiating PFDE. APNODE is hosted and supported by African Development Bank and it is the most formal group among all the parliamentarians’ forums currently active.

African Parliamentarians Network on Development Evaluation (APNODE) was initiated at the AfrEA conference held in Yaounde, Cameroon in March 2014 after one year of initiating PFDE. APNODE is hosted and supported by African Development Bank and it is the most formal group among all the parliamentarians’ forums currently active.

More importantly, the first ever national parliamentarians’ forum for evaluation was initiated in Nepal by a group of parliamentarians. In this context, EvalPartners together with other stakeholders organized one-day meeting entitled “Towards a Global Parliamentarians Forum for Evaluation” which was held in Dublin, Ireland on 2nd October 2014 at the EES conference. The meeting was attended by parliamentarians from different regions, regional VOPE leaders and representatives of international organizations. Ms. Caroline Heider, Senior Vice President of the World Bank made the key note speech highlighting importance of parliamentarians engaging in evaluation. As agreed in the meeting it was decided to launch the Global Parliamentarians Forum for Evaluation at Global Evaluation Week in Nov 2015. It was launched on 25th Nov by Hon. Kabir Hashim, Leader of the Forum at the Parliament of Nepal.