Director, Evaluation Office (D-2), Rome, Italy

Organizational Context

UNICEF operates in over 190 countries and territories, dedicated to saving children's lives, defending their rights, and helping them fulfill their potential from early childhood through adolescence. We are committed, passionate, and proud of our work, viewing the promotion of every child's rights not just as a job, but as a calling. UNICEF offers diverse opportunities for professional and personal development.

Job Purpose

The Director of Evaluation, reporting directly to the Executive Director, leads the functionally independent Evaluation Office. This role is pivotal in enabling organizational learning, accountability, and performance improvement by providing intellectual and organizational leadership and strategic guidance for UNICEF's evaluation function. The Director is responsible for managing the Evaluation Office staff and ensuring its overall performance. This position sets the vision for an effective evaluation function, guiding all aspects of evaluation policy and practice, including adherence to international norms and standards, strategic coverage, application of technical methods, quality assurance, and defining roles and responsibilities. The Director also leads the development of the evaluation function, facilitates its resourcing, manages partnerships, and advocates for the uptake and use of evaluation results across the organization.

Responsibilities

The Director of Evaluation provides intellectual and organizational leadership and strategic guidance for UNICEF’s evaluation policy and function. They set clear performance standards for methodological rigor, credibility, and use across various evaluation approaches, including impact, real-time, outcome, and project/programme evaluations. Annually, the Director submits an independent report to the Executive Board on the evaluation policy's implementation and proposes necessary updates. They prepare and revise the global evaluations plan, emphasizing impact, effectiveness, and value-for-money, and identify strategic priorities and corporate thematic evaluations, ensuring adequate resources. The Director designs, commissions, and manages independent corporate evaluations adhering to international standards, employing robust methodologies for assessing attribution, cost-effectiveness, and causal pathways. A comprehensive assessment system is established to gauge the performance and quality of the evaluation function organization-wide, ensuring evaluations meet policy standards and tracking recommendation uptake. Public access to evaluations and management responses is facilitated, and relevant results are communicated to the Executive Director, Global Management Team, staff, and stakeholders. The Director promotes the use of evaluations and knowledge management through timely dissemination and follow-up on implementation and lessons learned. Strategies and systems are developed to build organization-wide evaluation capacity, including technical review of candidates, guidance to offices, and long-term career development for staff, enhancing the professionalization of the function with competencies in quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, causal inference, and evidence use. Innovative approaches and methodologies for evaluation work are developed and shared.

Work Experience

A minimum of 15 years of progressively responsible professional experience in evaluation, research, policy analysis, or a related field, with at least 5 years at a senior management level. Experience in leading and managing complex evaluation functions within a large international organization is highly desirable.

Skills

Strategic leadership, Evaluation methodology, Organizational management, Policy development, Performance monitoring, Data analysis, Stakeholder engagement, Knowledge management, Capacity building, Financial oversight, Communication, Interpersonal skills

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