Caribbean news. It is our pleasure to send this message to the Caribbean Evaluators International at the historical moment of celebrating International Year of Evaluation in the first regional evaluation conference. CEI as a new regional VOPE made a great progress in the recent past and helped Caribbeans to successfully join the EvalYear initiative. 
Year 2015 was declared as the International Year of Evaluation at the Third International Conference on National Evaluation Capacities organized in São Paulo, Brazil, 29 Sep-2 Oct 2013.
The aim of designating 2015 as the International Year of Evaluation is to advocate and promote evaluation and evidence-based policy making at international, regional, national and local levels.
EvalYear is a global movement to strengthen an enabling environment for evaluation at different levels. The aim is to strengthen the demand for and use of evaluation to inform public policies that are equity-focused and gender-responsive.
2015 is the year when the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will be replaced by a new set of internationally agreed goals, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). It is now widely acknowledged that national development policies and programmes should be informed by evidence generated by credible national monitoring and evaluation systems, while ensuring policy coherence at regional and global level. This will ensure evaluation is mainstreamed in SDG as well as national development goals.
Photo courtesy www.anzea.org.nz
EvalPartners brings together national/ regional evaluation associations, development partners, parliamentarians, civil society and government representatives to prepare to celebrate 2015 as the International Year of Evaluation and to use the visibility brought to evaluation profession by the EvalYear 2015 to strengthen an evaluation culture in each country.
A series of 33 international evaluation events have been planned for 2015, in which an “evaluation torch” will be passed over. Most importantly United Nations endorsed International Year of Evaluation through the UN Resolution on Evaluation.
United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon lit the evaluation torch at the UN Evaluation Group Evaluation Week and emphasized the importance of evaluation in the post 2015 development agenda and expressed United Nation’s commitment towards it.
EvalPartners is also facilitating a multi stakeholder consultation to generate ideas for the Global Evaluation Agenda for 2016-2020. The Global Evaluation Agenda will guide mainstreaming evaluation at national level and global development agenda. The Global Evaluation Agenda for 2016-2020 will be launched in November 2015 at the Parliament of Nepal in the context of Global Evaluation Week.
EvalPartners send best wishes together with the Evaluation Torch to Caribbean Evaluators International for the successful celebration of IYE.
Marco Segone and Natalia Kosheleva, EvalPartners Co-chairs
Ziad Moussa, IOCE President
