Evaluation & Facilitation
This is the continuation of the blog I started in 2008 in https://developblog.org. I don’t earn any money with it – I just enjoy sharing! Comments are disabled now because I have received an incredible amount of spam. If you would like to engage with me on any blog post, just send a message via the contact form.
The OECD Quality Standards for Development Evaluation and the related "Better Criteria for Better Evaluation" are major references for evaluations in international development cooperation. They have been crafted and revised (in a global consultation process 2018-2019, hence "better") to support rigorous, nuanced analysis of development interventions that can feed into broader learning and deliber ...
For an evaluation to be useful, it needs to be well prepared, typically in the inception phase: That is the moment when evaluators familiarise themselves with what they are supposed to evaluate (the evaluand). For instance, a kick-off workshops would present the contours of the evaluand and key stakeholders to the evaluators. Then the evaluation team would interview a few people to understand mor ...
Good communication is important if you want an evaluation to be useful. There is too much bad communication in the world of evaluation. We have a big jargon problem, hiding our work behind pompous labels and acronyms, and presenting our findings so elegantly that no-one understands what we really mean. The latest evaluation conference I attended was called “Transdisciplinarity – impulses for a ...
Everyone can contribute to more equality between genders and people in general, regardless of one's gender, age, skin tone, social class and other aspects. Everyone can do that from their current place in society. But people who are near the top of social hierarchies often know very little about all the big & small trouble & pain experienced by people closer to the bottom. An example: Mos ...
…play a part in good evaluation. Of course! A friend challenged me on my last-but-one post (Evaluation - a waste of money?), saying that better evaluation terms of reference (TOR) don‘t necessarily make better evaluations. The friend is right. Sometimes evaluators do a poor job just because they don’t know how to do better, or because feel they don‘t need to meet the highest attainable standard. ...