Evaluation serves three main purposes. It strengthens accountability, evidence-based decision making and learning. It is governed by the evaluation policy, approved by the Executive Board. The Evaluation Office reports directly to the Executive Board, including through the Annual Report on Evaluation. 

UNFPA conducts centralized evaluations to assess organization wide issues, and decentralized evaluations of country and regional programmes. All UNFPA evaluations are publicly available together with their management response. A quadrennial budgeted evaluation plan, approved by the Executive Board, provides a basis for monitoring and reporting on the evaluation function.

The Evaluation Office prioritizes enhancing the use of evaluations to contribute to evidence-based decision making; intensifying coherence with other UN entities; and strengthening national evaluation capacities through multi-stakeholder partnerships, including with young and emerging evaluators. To propel the global evaluation community toward the achievement of SDGs by 2030, the Evaluation Office co-leads the Decade of EVALUATION for Action, also known as the Eval4Action campaign.