In May, Lisa Howes shared her thoughts on our evaluation of the World Food Programme’s environmental policy – the scope, the challenges, our findings and recommendations, and what we learnt about working on such a wide-ranging project. This broad-ranging policy covers aspects of WFP’s work and operations, ranging from offices and supply chains to ‘food for assets’ and resilience agriculture programming.

Over the summer, Roeland Hemsteede and our long-standing Nepali associate, Rita Shrestha, shared their insights and reflections on the critical role of local expertise in education evaluation, drawing on a project in Nepal’s Solukhumbu district, the home of Mount Everest. The project was grounded in the expertise of Nepali evaluators, whose deep knowledge and understanding of the area made our ways of working much more effective than they might have been otherwise, and the findings more nuanced and informed, making them more useful for future programming.

In this blog for World Food Day in October, Karl-Axel Lindgren reflected on the urgent need for more systems thinking in food security, drawing on insights from our work on this topic over the last year. The blog argues that organisations need to think more about food security from a systems perspective, with millions still lacking access to healthy, affordable diets, and the way we produce and consume food continues to exceed planetary limits.

We also shared a number of ‘getting to know you’ and ‘Accidental Evaluator’ blogs – talking to our colleagues about their work and career paths – find them all below!

• Getting to know IOD PARC: Joy McCarron
• Accidental Evaluator: Andrea Steigerwald
• Getting to know IOD PARC: Vijay Shrestha
• Getting to know IOD PARC: Nur Abdelkhaliq Zamora

Intentional Generalist: Erica Packington (part of the Accidental Evaluator series)