On Thursday, June 25th, DME for Peace hosted Dr. Tammy Smith, Senior Monitoring & Evaluation Specialist at the UN Peacebuilding Support Office, for a Thursday Talk on how the UN Peacebuilding Fund adapted its M&E approach to better accommodate complex and dynamic environments.
The UN Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund (PBF) was established in 2006 to encourage timely, innovative and politically risky programming in countries emerging from conflict or deep political crisis. Mandated to maintain a “light footprint”, the PBF first gained M&E capacity in 2010. From 2010 to 2014, the Fund focused its evaluation efforts exclusively on producing final evaluations as a means of addressing both learning as well as the accountability concerns of donors. In line with its move toward greater and earlier forms of design and implementation guidance to Fund recipients, in 2014, PBF redesigned its M&E approach to better accommodate complex and dynamic peacebuilding settings. The new approach lays out a three-step process of distinct moments of reflection and opportunities for recalibration through an evaluability assessment, midterm partnership review and final evaluation in programming countries. PBF has begun rolling out this new framework in 2015 and looks forward to discussing some of the anticipated benefits but also some of the persistent challenges it faces moving forward.
Recording:
M&E Thursday Talk: Adapting to Complex and Dynamic Environments The UN Peacebuilding Fund’s New M&E Approach from DME for Peace on Vimeo.
Presentation: Click here for the PowerPoint presentation (link is external).
Summary: Check back soon for the Thursday Talk summary.
About the Speaker:
Tammy Smith’s professional life has been divided between international development, humanitarian action and peacebuilding on the one hand and academia on the other, though always focused on conflict and post-conflict settings. Since 2013, Tammy Smith has headed up the Monitoring & Evaluation Unit within the UN Secretary-General’s Peacebuilding Fund. From 2009 until 2013, Tammy served in a variety of posts with UNICEF, including in New York as Senior Peacebuilding Advisor and as Humanitarian Evaluation Specialist, and in Yemen, as Chief of Social Policy, Planning and M&E. Prior to joining the UN in 2009, Tammy was Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, with a research agenda focused on conflict and post-conflict societies, gender and institution building. Tammy’s research interests reflect work in her early career on economic and political transitions, mostly in the Balkans. From 1995-1999, Tammy worked in Croatia and Bosnia on human rights and local governance with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Tammy earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University in 2007 and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia’s SIPA in 1997.