Nairobi, 18 May 2020—UN-Habitat and its partners United Cities and Local Governments have released a new publication aimed at bettering monitoring and evaluations.

Monitoring and Evaluating National Urban Policy: A Guide is a timely and long awaited tool seeking to help countries, national and local  governments, know when, and if, urban policies are working and if they fit for purpose for a more resilient World.  The Guide highlights how solidarity is needed between national, local and regional governments, along with other stakeholders. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E), becomes very critical to check if indeed all relevant actors are those who count are involved in the development and implementation of urban policies. 

The guide reveals how without effective monitoring and evaluation system, it is impossible to assess if work is going in the right direction, whether progress and success can be claimed, and how future efforts might be improved.

In their joint Foreword to this Guide, Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Executive Director of UN-Habitat and Emilia Saiz, Secretary General of UCLG note that: ‘… this publication is timely for countries that are seeking to implement their national urban policies and to review existing policies in order to make real and transformative changes. The Guide provides clear steps and tips on how to design, manage, and deploy good monitoring and evaluation for urban policy and to support the implementation of the SDGs and the NUA.' 

This Guide comes to complement UN-Habitat’s and UCLG’s effort to support countries developing and implementing of National Urban Policies (NUP). This is so because policies provide the most needed frameworks compass for sustainable urban development. The Guide takes you through critical steps to establish clear links between past, present and future initiatives and development results. Doing so, helps an organisation extracts relevant information from past and ongoing activities that can be used as the basis for programmatic fine-tuning, reorientation and future planning.

The Guide contains selected tools for monitoring and evaluating of NUP. This Guide further recommends that national, regional and local governments be empowered to monitor and evaluate urban policies as they are not only aware of the demands, changing tasks and needs of their constituencies, but they are also conscious of the territorial and spatial inequalities that need to be highlighted in national policy making.