On 13 October 2020, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) organized a knowledge sharing session on NVivo, an innovative qualitative analysis software that can be used for evaluation, in order to better centralize and code data, facilitate searches, conduct deeper analysis and articulate findings to increase credibility.

Mr Nuri Niyazi and Ms Valentina Di Marco Conte, respectively Evaluation Research Analyst and Evaluation Consultant, Independent Office of Evaluation (IOE), presented IFAD’s experience on using NVivo for evaluation. Mr Fabrizio Felloni, Interim Officer-in-Charge, IOE, also participated in the event.

Despite numerous strengths – such as an intuitive interface, an easy coding system, fast instant text searches and the creation of an institutional memory of data – the presentation was useful to also highlight the limitations of the software and all those aspects that will need to be improved in the future: for instance, the time-consuming information coding system and the limited ‘share-ability’ of the database.