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!
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.
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).
