From Tarek Azzam in Accra, Ghana: The last two days have been hectic on many fronts. Matt and I spent approximately 4 hours on Monday trying to work out technical bugs. Time well spent as it looks like we will be able to stream parts of the conference live. You can find the schedule and links here.
I have had the chance to speak with many conference participants from across Africa at various social events. In almost every conversation the same issue keeps emerging—the disconnect between what donors expect to see on the ground (and expect to be measured) and what grantees are actually seeing on the ground (and do not believe they can measure). Although this is a common issue in the US where I do much of my work, it appears to be more pronounced in the context of development programs.
This tension is a source of frustration for many of the people with whom I speak—they truly believe in the power of evaluation to improve programs, promote self-reflection, and achieve social change. However, demands from donors have pushed them to focus on evaluation questions and measures that are not necessarily useful to their programs or the people their programs benefit. I am interested in speaking with some of the donors attending the conference to get their perspective on this issue. I believe that donors may be looking for impact measures that can be aggregated across multiple grantees, and this may lead to the selection of measures that are less relevant to any single grantee, hence the tension.
I plan on keeping you updated on further conversations and discussions as they occur. Tomorrow I will be helping to conduct a workshop on building evaluation capacity within Africa, and really engaging participants as they help us come up with a list of competencies and capacities that are uniquely relevant to the development/African context. Based on the lively conversations I have had so far, I anticipate a rich and productive exchange of ideas tomorrow. I will share them with you as soon as I can.
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