WHO Evaluation Office

WHO Evaluation supports the Organization by promoting accountability, transparency, learning, and organizational performance and effectiveness through independent, credible and useful evaluations.

The WHO Evaluation Office, located within the Office of Internal Oversight Services, leads the Organization’s independent evaluation function. Evaluation strengthens accountability, promotes learning, and enhances organizational performance. Through impartial, high-quality assessments, WHO Evaluation supports evidence-based decision-making and planning, helping ensure that WHO’s policies, systems, and interventions deliver better health outcomes for all. Evaluation is also a cornerstone of WHO’s results-based management approach.

As a functionally independent entity, the Office is dedicated to guaranteeing that evaluation processes are inclusive, impartial and conducted with scientific rigour. Widely disseminating evaluation findings and recommendations is a key priority, with a strong emphasis on fostering opportunities for collective learning. The focus extends to actively exploring ways to implement recommendations to improve organizational effectiveness and outcomes.

Working collaboratively with partners and across the Organization, WHO Evaluation fosters a culture of continuous improvement, sharing insights that inform future action and strengthen WHO’s effectiveness in protecting lives, promoting health, and improving well-being worldwide.
 

UN Evaluation Group (UNEG) defines evaluation as follows

"… an assessment, as systematic and impartial as possible of an activity, project, programme, strategy, policy, theme, sector, operational area or institutional performance. It focuses on expected and achieved accomplishments examining the results chain, processes, contextual factors and causality, in order to understand achievements or the lack thereof. It aims at determining the relevance, impact, effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of the interventions and contributions of the organizations of the UN system."
 

Partnerships

WHO Evaluation partners with global networks, UN entities, and NGOs to strengthen the quality, credibility, and impact of its evaluations. As an active member of the UN Evaluation Group (UNEG), it aligns with UN norms and contributes to system-wide coherence. WHO also collaborates with UN agencies and multilateral partners on joint and system-wide evaluations in health and humanitarian contexts.