OPEN CALL
A while back, we began working with colleagues in the region on the concepts of evaluation, inclusion and democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean. In the new EvalParticipativa project (2023-2024) we plan to revisit these ideas and produce a book on the subject. Our aim is to identify participatory evaluation experiences in Latin America and the Caribbean, analysing dimensions of inclusion and democracy, and emphasising the learning components generated by these experiences.
The book’s target audience is made up of individuals who are responsible for designing and carrying out evaluations, in the hope of increasing their awareness of the possibility and feasibility of conducting evaluations with civil society participation. We seek to bring this awareness both into their consciousness and onto their agendas. The book is intended for Latin American bodies that provide capacity building and training in evaluation, in the hope that it will make available real cases of evaluations carried out with the participation of civil society in the region. Our target readers are teachers and students in diploma courses, master’s degrees or other specialisations focused on evaluation and social planning, in the hope of influencing the training of professionals who will in the future be conducting, commissioning, supervising and assessing participatory evaluations in the region.
how to participate?
In this document we present a general, preliminary overview of the aspects we intend the book to address. We are clear that the focus should be on presenting one or more existing evaluation experiences as the core data for analysis, without excluding the possibility that some general remarks or proposals may be added where appropriate. In other words, a substantial part of each chapter should be devoted to a descriptive and analytical account of one or several evaluation experiences, while a smaller part may be dedicated to more general or propositional reflections that build on the first section.
This brief post is therefore an invitation to friends and colleagues of EvalParticipativa who are interested in contributing a chapter to the book to email their ideas to eval.participativa@gmail.com.
We will select the chapters that will be included in the book from the submissions we receive. We thank you in advance for sharing this announcement with colleagues and contacts interested in these topics.
Best wishes,
The EvalParticipativa team
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 
Dear colleagues, we are thrilled to announce that the winners of the 
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.
Since 2019, the EvalParticipativa community of practice and learning has been working on a path of knowledge and deepening of participatory evaluation experiences carried out in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our virtual platform is witness to the 
As outlined in the 
Some of the EvalParticipativa member entities such as 
Since 2019, the EvalParticipativa initiative, a community of practice and learning for participatory evaluation in Latin America and the Caribbean, has been run by 
Over the next 18 months, we intend to continue learning from concrete experiences of participatory evaluation in the region, maximising their scope of influence and sharing methods and tool. This work stems from our conviction that these approaches:
Evalparticipativa’s online platform has been the hub and meeting place for this evaluation community. We will work on maintaining and keeping its different sections up to date, adding posts, handbooks and tools as well as identifying and documenting new experiences of high-quality Participatory Evaluation and meaningful lessons on the topic in the region.
We intend to offer talks to disseminate information on the reality of participatory evaluation in conferences, postgraduate courses and events. We will recover some of the valuable articles and experiences documented on the EvalParticipativa platform in order to publish an online document or booklet.
We will develop participatory evaluation training sessions, both online and in-person. The latter will be delivered to agencies of our main funder, the German Cooperation Ministry, with an initial focus on Ecuador and Colombia that will then be expanded to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean.
We are beginning the second stage of EvalParticipativa with a new activity plan that we will share soon. In the meantime we invite you to listen to the testimony of Juan Carlos Sanz, who represents DEval in the Coordinating Team of this regional initiative.
In this video (with English subtitles), Matthias Casasco from TECHO Chile highlights the importance of participatory evaluation as a tool with the potential to provide a bridge between the locals’ voices and decision making.