MANILA DECLARATION

Institutionalizing Monitoring and Evaluation in Support of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals

1. We, the participants of the 4th Asia Pacific Evaluation Association (APEA) Conference in Manila from December 4 to 7, 2023 and of the Parliament Day as the conference’s culminating event, convene on this 7th day of December 2023 at the House of Representatives of the Philippines.

2. In view of the stalled progress towards critical Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and other factors, we underscore the urgency of addressing persisting social and economic inequalities to create a sustainable and equitable future for people in the Asia Pacific region.

3. We affirm the critical contributions of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in generating credible and timely information that governmental and non-governmental organizations can use as inputs for prioritizing, budgeting, and implementing relevant, coherent, effective, impactful, and efficient development interventions in support of the 2030 SDGs.

4. We recognize that despite the huge potential of M&E in improving governance, government performance, and development outcomes, its routine conduct, communication, and use for better decision-making are yet to be fully institutionalized in many countries.

5. To institutionalize M&E and engender a culture of evidence-based decision-making across governmental and non-governmental organizations, we acknowledge and highlight the key contributions of the following key drivers for institutionalizing M&E in the Asia Pacific region:

• Parliaments and parliamentarians, as the largest audience of M&E within countries, in developing integrated national M&E policies and systems that strengthen the demand, supply, and use of M&E to guide development interventions for the SDGs; 

• Strong national evaluation capacities in conducting, managing, communicating, and utilizing country-led M&E of development interventions; 

• International development agencies and voluntary organizations for professional evaluation (VOPEs) assuming valuable roles of advocating the sustained institutionalization of evaluation and strengthening national evaluation capacities; and

• Societal, political, and institutional partnerships for strengthening M&E capacities within and across countries.

6. In view of the foregoing, we thus adhere to the following strategies toward deeper societal, political, and organizational institutionalization of M&E in support of the 2030 SDGs:

• Engage and support parliaments for greater demand and utilization of credible, timely, and useful M&E information as inputs for oversight, lawmaking, budgeting, and constituency representation functions of parliaments and parliamentarians;

• Strengthen national M&E ecosystems including through legislation to ensure the routine use of M&E information in planning, budgeting, and implementing development interventions; 

• Promote partnerships for evaluation capacity development in the Asia Pacific region to increase the supply of qualified competent, credible, and young evaluators through the development and use of M&E competency framework, standards, education curricula, academic programs, and training courses; 

• Promote country-led and community-owned evaluations through engagements with governments, parliaments, non-government organizations, communities, and citizens, in developing and implementing national evaluation agenda for the 2030 SDGs; and

• Promote the use of credible and timely country-led evaluations as inputs for the voluntary national reviews (VNRs) of country progress towards their SDG targets.

7. Reiterating the development dividends from M&E institutionalization, we call upon governments, parliaments, international development agencies, VOPEs, non-government organizations, and other development actors to operationalize the above strategies through partnerships and through respective action plans, policies, and systems to institutionalize M&E in support of the 2030 SDGs.