Regional context and lessons from GEF implementation: what the OPS8 evaluation shows

Authors: Ania Ostapenko, Taisiia Kryvenko, Ihor Dunaiev

The Eighth Comprehensive Evaluation of the GEF (OPS8), published by the GEF Independent Evaluation Office at the end of 2025, shows where the fund’s projects work best and what separates lasting results from one-off ones. It contains no separate findings on Ukraine, but the Europe and Central Asia region, to which Ukraine belongs, has the highest ratings for completed projects. We look at the evaluation’s main figures and at what hromadas preparing projects can take from them.

What is the OPS8 evaluation, and does it cover Ukraine?

The full title of the report is “Integration for Greater Impact: Eighth Comprehensive Evaluation of the GEF”. Its outcome ratings are based on 2,449 completed projects whose ratings were independently validated through June 2025.

Ukraine appears in the report only in passing:

• a UNIDO project on the disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls in Ukraine (GEF ID 4386) is mentioned as an example of technological solutions in chemicals management;
• the World Bank regional project for the Black Sea, “Blueing the Black Sea” (GEF ID 10563), with Ukraine among its participants, is cited as an example of policy harmonisation across several countries;
• Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the report says, had minimal engagement in the Country Engagement Strategy despite relatively higher institutional capacity, and held no national dialogues during the period reviewed.

So below we rely on the evaluation’s general findings and apply them to what we see in Ukrainian hromadas.

Why do projects in Europe and Central Asia have the highest ratings?

Share of completed GEF-5 to GEF-7 projects with satisfactory outcome ratings and likely sustainability:

Europe and Central Asia also ranks first on quality of implementation (93%), but second place there goes to Latin America (90%), not Asia. In the region, 90% of projects have satisfactory monitoring and evaluation design, and 84% satisfactory implementation of it.

According to the evaluation, the greatest difficulties are faced by projects in Africa, Latin America, small island developing states and fragile and conflict-affected countries. The report links the differences primarily to country status: least developed and fragile states find it harder.

What determines whether a result outlives the grant?

The evaluation calls this gap between outcomes and sustainability persistent, although overall the GEF’s performance is in line with other international organisations. What recurs in the cluster evaluations of drylands, the Lower Mekong basin and the island states of the Pacific and the Caribbean:

• results last where the project is embedded in local institutions and national policies rather than running in parallel to them;
• financial sustainability is a common weakness: many initiatives continue to depend heavily on external donor funding;
• project monitoring is not integrated into national reporting systems.

For a hromada preparing a project, this leads to a simple rule: before the start, decide who will finance the result after the grant and whose reporting the indicators will become part of.

How does a GEF project move beyond the pilot?

The evaluation’s logic is this: GEF resources are limited, so transformational change is only possible when others take up the results at scale. In a sample of 81 completed GEF-6 and GEF-7 projects it looked like this:

Examples from the evaluation:

• Philippines (GEF ID 5767, UNDP): a city replicated sustainable land management practices with its own agriculture budget, and the province scaled them up.
• Sri Lanka (GEF ID 5677, FAO): after the success of farmer field schools, which moved online during the pandemic, the government expanded the approach.
• Uruguay (GEF ID 4998, UNDP): mercury analysis training was institutionalised in a pilot laboratory, and five years after the project closed its participants from six Latin American countries still work in a shared network.

Why are policy coherence and behaviour change achieved less often?

The evaluation looked at 39 completed GEF-6 and GEF-7 projects that planned to change policies across several sectors. 87% of them implemented the planned activities, but only 18 projects, or 46%, achieved tangible policy coherence results.

Two examples where it worked:

• Morocco (GEF ID 2554, UNDP): a project approved back in GEF-3 played a key role in developing Energy Efficiency Law No. 47-09 with building codes and mandatory energy audits, and spurred a national green cities programme.
• Western Balkans (GEF ID 3690, UNDP): interministerial committees on water policy were set up in four Dinaric Karst countries, and in Albania the project contributed to the creation of a water resources management agency.

Behaviour change follows a similar pattern. Among GEF-8 projects aimed at behaviour change, 38% align their activities with the needs of the people concerned (14% in earlier projects), and 43% strengthen institutional capacity (previously 24%).

How efficiently does the GEF spend its money?

The GCF figures in the report cover 2021 to 2023, and the lowest administrative cost share in this comparison belongs to another fund of the GEF family, the LDCF, at 1%. The evaluation calls the GEF the most efficient among the vertical climate funds specifically in terms of its administrative cost to expenditure ratio.

On speed, the picture is mixed:

• the median time from concept approval to CEO endorsement in GEF-8 fell to about 18 to 19 months, compared with 22 to 23 in GEF-6 and GEF-7, although the figure differs between sections of the report;
• the time from endorsement to first disbursement, on the contrary, has grown, partly because of the pandemic: for projects endorsed in 2022 to 2023 the median was 20 months, compared with 9 and 11 months in GEF-7 and GEF-6.

The evaluation also notes growing complexity. In addition to STAR allocations, the GEF Trust Fund runs five competitive windows, including the Non-Grant Instrument Program, the Innovation Window and the SGP CSO Challenge, while the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) is a separate fund with its own selection.

What do these findings mean for hromadas and our initiative?

What follows is the authors’ position, not a GEF finding:

1. Anchor the result in rules. After GEF projects, policies and institutional changes spread most often. Environmental requirements in local procurement are exactly this kind of change: they work every year, not only for the duration of the grant.
2. Plan financial sustainability from day one. A hromada carries out procurement from its own budget, so green requirements in it do not depend on continued donor funding.
3. Build monitoring into local reporting. ESG indicators that the hromada tracks itself do not disappear when the project ends.
4. Factor war risks into the plan. For front-line hromadas implementation is harder, so the project should provide fallback options for works and access.

There is a resource for this work: Ukraine’s GEF-9 allocation is $9.06 million, and in this cycle it can go to any of the three areas. We explained how the allocation works in the second article in this series, and how GEF money reaches Ukraine in the first.

Figures are given according to the OPS8 report of the GEF Independent Evaluation Office and its 2025 Annual Performance Report; percentages refer to completed projects with independently validated ratings. The conclusions for hromadas and the initiative on green procurement and ESG standards are the authors’ position, not the GEF’s. This material is for information only.