EVALPARTICIPATIVA AT GLOBAL EVALUATION WEEK – GLOCAL2023

Greetings fellow EvalParticipativa colleagues,

Earlier this week we took part in the gLOCAL 2023 roundtable discussion, CHALLENGES IN PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION: A FEMINIST AND DECOLONIAL APPROACH. The activity was organised jointly with Kalidadea, a feminist consultancy network, working in the field of international cooperation and development.

Evaluations entail several different challenges including ensuring that the process empowers those involved by achieving a sufficient level of effective participation across a diverse set of participants. Another challenge is to ensure meaningful gender mainstreaming and a move towards feminist evaluations rooted in human rights.

The aim of the roundtable was to create space for reflection on these challenges and on how to integrate participatory and feminist approaches successfully into our evaluations in a way that is relevant, effective and appropriate to the groups we work with, be they local communities or the general public.

Our speakers—Esteban Tapella from PETAS, Lara González Gómez, director of Kalidadea and Alejandra Lucero Manzano, member of PETAS and Kalidadea— introduced some of these challenges and suggested ways to overcome them. They shared concrete strategies and ecofeminist principles intended to contribute new perspectives for developing empowering evaluation processes based on a decolonial perspective. The roundtable was moderated by Vanesa Castro (a PETAS researcher). You can click the link below to watch the recording which includes a Q&A session with the participants.

The gLOCAL Evaluation Week is a unique knowledge-sharing event, connecting a global community of people across sectors and regions. Over the course of a week, participants join events—in their own regions and further afield—to learn from each other on a vast number of topics and experiences. By helping participants understand how their work fits in with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) ecosystems in their region and the larger M&E community worldwide, gLOCAL helps to inspire and energise a global movement: individuals and organisations that value the power of evidence to improve people’s lives. gLOCAL, is convened and supported by the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), a network of organisations and experts that supports countries with strengthening their M&E systems in order to help governments gather and use evidence that improves the lives of their citizens.

We were delighted to take part in this event again this year!

gLOCAL Evaluation Week 2022

We invite you to be part of the gLOCAL Evaluation Week 2022.

The gLOCAL Evaluation Week (”gLOCAL”), is an annual dedicated week for Monitoring and Evaluation (“M&E”) knowledge and experience sharing events around the globe, was launched in 2019. In the short time since gLOCAL was launched, organizing partners from around the world have hosted nearly 1000 M&E focused events across five continents in multiple languages. During gLOCAL, government officials, evaluation practitioners, academics and researchers, and students, among many others, have joined this global movement to discuss M&E issues, connecting with one another to share their knowledge and experiences in this field.

Continue reading

ONLINE TRAINING ON PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

Dear community,

A few weeks ago, we shared an interesting conversation on our platform about participatory evaluation possibilities in times of covid-19.

Many of you had already demonstrated great optimism and confidence that it could work and today we are pleased to be able to back this up with a little more information.

As you know, online formats have become the safest, if not the only, way to build capacity in these pandemic times. This has also been understood by the EvalYouth initiative and Focelac project leaders who have arranged a series of online workshops aimed at strengthening the capacity of young and/or emerging evaluators (YEEs) in the region. The University of Costa Rica has taught a Masters in Evaluation for over 17 years and is now delivering its program fully online and asked us to participate in the section on Participatory Evaluation which features in the modules on evaluation approaches for the Latin American reality.

Continue reading

ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION: “BY REASON OR BY FORCE” DOCUMENTARY LAUNCH

Dear friends and colleagues, we hope you are all well!

We would like to invite you all to participate in the official launch of our documentary By Reason or By Force and its accompanying round table discussion which will be held on 24 July at 6pm UCT -3 (see the trailer and link to participate at the end of this entry).

The documentary was part of the participatory evaluation of the Working Groups and was organised together with TECHO, one of EvalParticipativa’s strategic partners. The evaluation methodology was replicated in different countries of the region.

Here, we let you see behind the scenes of this documentary and the evaluative experience; topics that we will touch on in addition to the film in the round table discussion.

Continue reading

ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS RAISED IN THE WEBINAR “EXPERIENCES OF PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION IN LATIN AMERICA”

Dear colleagues and friends, We hope you are well! We want to share with you the answers to questions that were not answered in our webinar held during the Evaluation Week.

We hope these responses will be useful as we continue to share and learn about this exciting topic and add new participants to this community of practice and learning.

Continue reading

WEBINAR: “EXPERIENCES OF PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION IN LATIN AMERICA”

On Tuesday 2 June, we held the EvalParticipativa seminar as part of the 2020 gLocal Evaluation Week. The slogan for the week was “Sharing local and global M&E knowledge”.

The main purpose of the seminar was to publicise and expand the community of practice and learning on participatory evaluation by sharing experiences and reflections on the potential and challenges inherent in this evaluation approach across the region.

Juan Carlos Sanz, from DEval, moderated the seminar with the support of Daniela Miranda from the Poverty Alleviation Foundation/Servicio País and Esteban Tapella from the EvalParticipativa coordinator team. Alejandra Gomez and María Carolina Sandoval from Focelac facilitated the recording and live transmission of the meeting.

The seminar had the pleasure of hosting the following four speakers:

Continue reading

EVALPARTICIPATIVA WILL BE GIVEN SPACE IN THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL GLOCAL EVALUATION WEEK. JOIN US!

On Tuesday 2 June from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. (CST) we will have the opportunity to present our community of learning to the world and converse with other colleagues on this evaluation method that excites us so much.

If you are interested in participating, sign up to the event through this link

On the actual day, you can access the webinar through this link

If you have any doubts, ask us by clicking on ‘RESPOND’ (below) or by sending an email to  eval.participativa@gmail.com

Don’t forget to check your time zone! You can check here. See you there!

2020 GLOCAL EVALUATION WEEK IS COMING

Dear Colleagues, we hope that despite the COVID 19 pandemic and the difficulties brought about by the lockdown and social isolation, you are in good health and motivated to continue learning and sharing information on this evaluation topic that excites us so much.

We are pleased to announce that the events calendar for Evaluation Week #EVAL2020 is now available. As already announced in several forums and networks, this year it will be totally online.

You can see the interactive map on this site , where you can see the online activities that will take place between 1 and 5 June. As you can see, they are ordered by country, but it is possible to participate in any of the events from any of the countries. You will note that there are a number of activities closely related to the broad theme of evaluation and social participation.

Best Wishes!

WE ARE NOT STARFISH, WE ARE CRAYFISH…

who turn up all wet, to walk against the current, stumbling along the way

Hear, hear colleagues!

Here we share the video/memoire of the Gathering of Participatory Evaluation Experiences in Quito, which we have talked extensively about in this community of practice and learning.

The video recalls our work in Ecuador over five days, covering five modules, in order to remind ourselves of the activities and results achieved. It is hopefully useful for communicating what we were doing there, remember each other’s faces and re-live those intense moments of sharing and learning.

Many thanks to Ana Clara Bustelo, from the PETAS team, who managed to summarise five days of intense work in just five minutes. We would love you to share it with your networks and contacts to encourage others involved in participatory evaluation and motivate them to join our community. In the near future, we will share a document summarising the gathering’s contents and conclusions, as well as the work plans for 2020.

Greetings from the EvalParticipativa team! Let’s stay in touch!

THANKS, THANKS, THANKS!

Greetings friends and colleagues!

Now that all our first EvalParticipativa gathering participants have returned home and are processing everything they have experienced, we are left with mixed emotions! We are nostalgic after our farewell but at the same time thrilled to have met such courageous people, both professionally and personally, and to have heard all about their experiences.

As the gathering’s organisational team, we want to once again thank everyone who got involved and contributed their best so that this gathering was, as so many of you commented, an unprecedented success and amazing experience. We are happy and tired as it required a lot of organisational energy… But oh so very happy! We hope to continue building this new community of practice and learning together. EvalParticipativa belongs to everyone involved and together we will make it grow even more.

Continue reading