Evaluation Archives - EVALUATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

Made in Africa Evaluation, Part 3: ‘Africa-led’ evaluation

July 6, 2018 Zenda Ofir 2

We need “Evaluation with African Characteristics” – in how we conceptualise evaluation and in how we lead and shape it in the interest of development on the continent. Instead of thinking about what this means, we tend to slavishly teach ... Read more »

Snippet: Evaluation as Risk Management

February 13, 2018 Zenda Ofir 0

Evaluators’ power and influence are limited. There are several reasons for this situation. One relates to how our craft is framed. We are used to ‘selling’ evaluation/M&E as serving accountability, decision-making, learning and knowledge generation. Yet evaluation is still frequently ... Read more »

Snippet: Judging ‘success’. The example of capacity development

February 8, 2018 Zenda Ofir 7

How good are we at defining and judging ‘success’ – the essence of what evaluators do? Let us consider a pertinent example: Every year the aid industry spends a quarter of its funding, around US$15 billion, on ‘capacity development’ (CD). ... Read more »

Snippet: Evaluators in Davos – and DED

January 25, 2018 Zenda Ofir 2

There are no evaluators this week in Davos. We are clearly not among the most powerful in the world. Yet I have always hoped that the very nature of our practice would enable us to contribute significantly and visibly to ... Read more »

Evaluation – a Beautiful Practice

March 18, 2017 Zenda Ofir 8

I believe that evaluation is a beautiful practice. Of course, I base this assessment on my own definition and sense of beauty. The nature of “beauty” has been the focus of many philosophical discourses over millennia. You may want to ... Read more »

Sustaining (development) impact

March 10, 2017 Zenda Ofir 0

These days we talk a lot about “sustainable development”. And about “evaluating impact”. But I continue to maintain that it is useless to evaluate the impacts of an intervention without focusing on whether such impacts have a good chance to ... Read more »

No, I am NOT a “development evaluator”. I evaluate FOR development.

February 21, 2017 Zenda Ofir 1

I do not do “development evaluation”. I do not practice the evaluation OF development. I evaluate FOR development. There is a difference. These days we are told that the need for the special category called “development evaluation” has receded because ... Read more »

This Idea Must Die!

September 17, 2016 Zenda Ofir 0

My last two blog posts addressed the issue of Grand Challenges in evaluation. A complementary idea: A type of ‘Grand Challenge’ for the profession (or perhaps rather, a smallish yet Important Challenge) is to make sure that outdated ideas die ... Read more »