Director, Evaluation Office (Rome)

Position description

UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children’s lives, defend their rights and help them fulfil their potential. Its work spans development and humanitarian contexts, supporting children and communities from early childhood through adolescence.

The Director, Evaluation Office, reports directly to the Executive Director and leads UNICEF’s functionally independent Evaluation Office. This is a senior leadership role with organisation-wide responsibility for evaluation policy, practice, quality, credibility and use. It is also a role for someone who can combine technical authority with operational leadership, ensuring that evidence informs decisions, strengthens performance and supports learning across UNICEF.

The role

As Director, you will set the vision for an effective evaluation function across the organisation. You will lead the implementation and ongoing development of UNICEF’s evaluation policy, ensuring adherence to international norms and standards, robust methodologies, clear roles and responsibilities, and the consistent use of quality assurance processes.

You will lead and manage the Evaluation Office, providing intellectual and organisational leadership while ensuring that the Office delivers relevant, timely and high-quality evaluations. You will establish performance standards for methodological rigour, credibility and use across a range of approaches, including impact evaluations, causal analysis, real-time evaluations, outcome evaluations and programme evaluations.

A key part of the role will be to prepare and periodically revise UNICEF’s global evaluation plan, with a strong focus on impact, effectiveness and value-for-money assessments. You will identify strategic priorities, commission and manage major corporate thematic evaluations, and ensure that evaluation work is properly resourced and positioned to support decision-making at headquarters, regional and country levels.

What you will lead

You will design, commission and manage independent corporate evaluations that meet international standards and apply robust evaluation designs. This includes methodologies capable of assessing attribution, contribution, cost-effectiveness and causal pathways in complex development and humanitarian settings.

Across UNICEF, you will strengthen systems for assessing the performance of the evaluation function, the quality and coverage of evaluations, and the uptake of management recommendations. You will support public access to evaluations and management responses, and ensure that relevant findings are shared with the Executive Director, the Executive Board, the Global Management Team, staff and stakeholders.

This role also carries a strong capacity-building mandate. You will promote strategies to strengthen organisation-wide evaluative capacity, support offices in designing and staffing evaluation functions, contribute to the professional development of evaluation staff, and advance competencies in quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods, causal inference and evidence use.

Externally, you will represent and strengthen UNICEF’s contribution to evaluation partnerships and networks. This includes promoting national ownership and leadership of evaluation activities, engaging with the United Nations Evaluation Group and other professional bodies, supporting innovation in evaluation practice, and contributing to United Nations system-wide evaluations.

Qualifications

To join UNICEF in this role, you should bring:

Education and technical foundation

• An advanced university degree in evaluation studies, economics, research methods or related disciplines such as development planning, international development, public administration or another closely related field.
• Specialised training in statistics, econometrics, or quantitative and mixed research methods would be an asset.

Evaluation and research expertise

• At least 15 years of progressively responsible experience in evaluation and/or research and evaluation management.
• Substantial experience designing and implementing evaluations, including at least 10 years in a senior position leading and managing an evaluation function or similar processes.
• Experience with rigorous evaluation methodologies, including randomised controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs and mixed-method approaches.
• Proven ability to assess causal impact, attribution, contribution and cost-effectiveness in complex development and humanitarian contexts.
• A strong track record as an evaluator or social science researcher generating high-quality, policy-relevant evidence on programme effectiveness and impact.
• Demonstrated expertise in evaluation standards, norms and good practice, including those used by UNEG, OECD/DAC, ALNAP and other relevant professional networks.

Leadership and organisational impact

• Proven experience leading diverse teams of evaluators at corporate and decentralised levels within a large organisation.
• Prior international-level experience.
• Strong management and leadership skills, with a record of empowering people to achieve results.
• Strategic and global thinking, including the ability to prioritise evaluations with the highest decision value and learning impact.
• The ability to foster innovation, manage risk and deliver results on time.

Communication, partnership and languages

• Excellent interpersonal, networking and partnership skills in a multicultural, high-performance environment.
• Strong communication skills, with the capacity to convey ideas clearly and advocate for organisational positions.
• Fluency in English. Knowledge of another UN language - Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish - is desirable.

Application instructions

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