OVERALL PERFORMANCE OF UNRWA . 45 UNRWA’s financial crisis has compelled the Agency to institute organisation-wide austerity measures, and a great deal of staff time and attention is being directed to resource management mobilisation, potentially at the expense of “doing” the work. UNRWA maintains tight financial management and it has clear data on expenditure by field of operations and by programme. The Agency has been able to continually adjust its spending based on funds available and to adjust programming as necessary, although decision-making has become more centralised at headquarters in this crisis. The work of the Department of Internal Oversight Services has been developed, but this has been incremental and insufficient due to funding constraints. UNRWA has a robust approach to risk management that considers relevant areas of risk to the organisation such as institutional (including reputational), programmatic, occupational and contextual (including political); UNRWA further reports risk against each of its strategic outcomes. Although UNRWA’s workforce is a key strength, there is a lack of systematic performance appraisal linked to staff promotion. Coupled with underlying resource insecurity risks, this can undermine productivity and motivation. Is UNRWA making a difference? There is a limited body of independent evidence against which to measure UNRWA’s ability to deliver and demonstrate relevant and sustainable results in a cost-efficient way. UNRWA’s results-based monitoring system is able to track its results to inform outcome-level reporting against strategic objectives. However, the Agency’s evaluation function has been a casualty of the funding crisis, and it has not been able to undertake a number of intended strategic evaluations due to insufficient funds. Therefore, few opportunities have arisen to triangulate UNRWA’s strategic reporting data, which indicate strong results in some programme areas (e.g. education, health), with independent and qualitative assessments. Beyond strategic evaluations, evaluations are built in as a deliverable in some UNRWA projects, a sign that evaluation to some extent is donor-driven rather than a strategic reflex of UNRWA management. The limited number of evaluations available for review note the extent to which highly challenging operational and humanitarian conditions have increased the relevance of and need for UNRWA’s services. Political turmoil, conflict, travel and trade restrictions, and resource constraints have significantly inhibited UNRWA’s ability to deliver results or meet planned delivery targets. Most evaluations note the impact of insufficient funds on their findings regarding the efficiency and cost effectiveness of UNRWA’s development. Evaluations also note the negative implications of funding uncertainty for the Agency’s cost-effective and efficient delivery of services and programming. Very few evaluations include any consideration of cost-benefit analysis or value for money, although many stakeholders perceive UNRWA, as a direct implementer with a predominantly national staff, as delivering significant achievements with the funding it receives. Available evaluations, however, note variable integration of cross-cutting issues, with human rights and protection mainstreamed in UNRWA’s approach and activities, while gender and (to a much lesser degree) climate change are addressed less consistently. 3.2. THE ORGANISATION’S PERFORMANCE JOURNEY Comparison with previous assessments MOPAN conducted its previous assessment of UNRWA in 2011. The assessment focused on UNRWA’s organisational effectiveness and did not include an examination of its development results. The previous assessment highlighted that UNRWA was underfunded. The Agency’s funding situation deteriorated significantly between 2011 and 2018, to which UNRWA has responded with efforts to make the best use of available resources and to advance resource mobilisation.