UNIR trains Ecuadorian Administration Officials to improve laws and public policies

06 / 10 / 2021

Members of the National Assembly, the National Technical Secretary of Planning and other institutions of Ecuador participated in the academic event, which used assessment tools.

Legislators and officials from the National Assembly and the National Planning Secretariat of Ecuador participated in a Workshop on “Evaluation of Public Policies” given by the International University of La Rioja (UNIR). The training was carried out virtually and face-to-face in public institutions.

The objective of the workshop is to train and bring awareness to officials on the importance of promoting a culture of evaluation of the laws, public policies, and social programs that are launched from the public institutions of Ecuador.”

The workshop was led by Aida López, expert in social research and professor of the master’s degree in social Intervention in Knowledge Societies at UNIR. She has more than 15 years of experience in the evaluation of public policies and social programs in Spain.

López has expressed that “a law cannot be enacted and have more than a year go by without evaluating and detecting possible fissures and failures that divert us from our main objective. If our objective is to reduce poverty and we are not achieving it, we must have the capacity to maneuver and make changes. If we don’t do it, we would be losing human, economic, and technological resources.”

In addition, she added that the evaluation serves to rationalize public policy decision-making. “Politicians make decisions on a daily basis, so it is essential to have a tool that allows us to assess whether it is a good decision and whether it benefits citizens.”

Training officials of the Executive Power

UNIR, in conjunction with the National Planning Secretariat, gave the workshop on “Evaluation of Public Policies”. The Undersecretary for Evaluation, Diana Aguirre, and officials from the Secretariat and other strategic government institutions were present at the event.

Aguirre stressed that “we must join forces with the academy to train officials and institutionalize evaluation to make it transparent and offer evidence on how public policy management is being carried out.”

Training for Assembly members and Legislative officials

The workshop was held with the support of the Citizen Participation Coordination and the Legislative School of the National Assembly. The director of Citizen Participation, Cecilia Velasque, assembly members and technical personnel in charge of evaluating the laws participated in the training.

For Velasque “the challenge of the National Assembly is to help the assembly members so that the laws do not remain on paper and are carried out in the best way. Through this workshop, we give them tools so they can assess whether the bills are leading to the social work and ecological policies that are so necessary today.”