Ockham IPS and ICON Institut implemented the Evaluation of UNESCO’s Capacity Development for Education for All (CapEFA) Programme.  The main purpose of this evaluation is to determine the relevance and effectiveness of the Capacity Development for Education for All (CapEFA) programme’s overall contribution to progress towards the realization of the Education for All (EFA) goals in its target countries, and to provide actionable and timely recommendations to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the positioning of the Programme to meet future needs and challenges related to the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in September 2015, and more specifically to the SDG 4 to ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’.

The focus of this evaluation is on assessing the CapEFA programme’s relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability. This evaluation does not focus on how the programme impacts on the EFA goals, due to the challenge in assessing the causality between the programme’s goals and the EFA indicators. The focus of the assessment is on whether the right conditions at the systemic and institutional levels are created to have an impact on these EFA macro-indicators. The evaluation was carried out based on a mixed-method approach. The process was structured into three core phases: desk and inception phase, field phase and synthesis phase. In the first phase, an evaluation framework and methodology for data collection was elaborated. In the second phase, the evaluation team carried out fieldwork evaluations in ten countries; UNESCO implemented 12 country evaluations itself, hiring external consultants in most of the remaining target countries. For triangulation purposes, additional interviews with UNESCO staff and donors and two surveys targeting national as well as global stakeholders of the CapEFA programme were conducted.