Voluntary National Reviews in Africa guide
Date
2019-11
Authors
CLEAR-AA
UNICEF
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
CLEAR-AA
Abstract
This guide is intended for officers in African
governments who are involved in developing
voluntary national reviews (VNRs) of country
performance against the Sustainable Development
Goals (SDGs). It is also intended for agencies
supporting VNR processes, such as UNICEF country
offices, donors, etc.
It is important that the SDGs are part of government
planning, and not seen as external goals separate from
what governments and other actors are doing. Hence
the VNRs should not be separate processes, but report
on what governments and other actors are doing to
address their domestic goals and their links to the
SDGs. For the VNR process to be valuable, it should
not just be a compliance exercise, but contribute to
reflection, learning and improvement of government
and non-government programmes, and assist in
integrating the SDGs into these domestic goals.
For the VNRs to be meaningful, they need to be based
on evidence. Evaluations are a powerful source of
evidence of how or how not government policies and
programmes are working and why, and guidance on
how and where to improve. Evaluations demonstrate
where resources are being poorly used, and enable
performance to be improved using the same
budget envelope.
The objective of this Guide is therefore to assist in the
incorporation of evidence from evaluations to inform
country policies and programmes, and the use of
these results in the development of the VNRs.
Description
Keywords
Voluntary National Reviews in Africa guide