Institution Background
The Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) at the United Nations Secretariat was established in 1994. The Office supports the Secretary-General in his/her oversight role concerning the financial and human resources of the Secretariat through audit, investigation, and inspection & evaluation.
The mandate of OIOS is derived from relevant General Assembly resolutions and decisions, including the founding resolution 48/218 B of 29 July 1994.
The Office aims to be an independent agent of change that promotes responsible administration of resources, a culture of accountability and transparency, and improved programme performance. OIOS is headquartered in New York. It has a total of 325 staff members and its budget for 2023 was around $61 million.
Evaluation Function
The Inspection and Evaluation Division (IED) within the OIOS is co-located with the two other Secretariat oversight divisions: the Internal Audit Division and the Investigations Division. IED undertakes inspections and evaluations to help assure Secretariat programmes' accountability for attaining their mandates, while in the process fostering institutional learning, and improvement, through reflection by programmes and Member States on performance and results.
IED conducts evidence-based evaluations of the United Nations Secretariat programmes with three main aims:
- Help programmes deliver better results;
- Enable the United Nations as a whole to learn from past experiences
- Provide public accountability.
The focus of IED's work is on assessing Secretariat programmes for their relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, and impact.
The overarching guidance for OIOS' evaluation work, has been in place since 2000 through the United Nations Regulations and Rules Governing Programme Planning, the Programme Aspects of the Budget, the Monitoring of Implementation and the Methods of Evaluation (PPBME) set forth in the Secretary-General's Bulletin - ST/SGB/2018/3.
Since 2021, the Secretariat Evaluation Policy designated IED as the central evaluation unit of the Secretariat.
IED has a total of 33 staff posts, 26 of which are based in New York and 7 in Entebbe, Uganda. The Division has close ties with, and is mandated to provide methodological guidance for, the work of all the evaluation functions of the United Nations Secretariat programmes.
IED is mandated to cover the work programme of the entire UN Secretariat:
- peace and security
- sustainable development
- human rights and humanitarian work
- management and support services
Promoting a culture of evaluation in-house
Providing methodological guidance to strengthen the rigor and use of evaluation within the United Nations Secretariat entities is a key function of IED. As such, IED supports colleagues from all Secretariat evaluation units through the provision of guidance documents and ad hoc evaluation advice.
