by Rituu B. Nanda & Randika de Mel
Let us join hands EvalParticipativa! Greetings from India!
Congratulations on the brilliant work you have been doing on promoting participation of communities in evaluation.
We are of the Asia Pacific Evaluation Association (APEA) action group on Community Ownership in Evaluation. We held an online Consultation in July 2021 in which 90 people participated from different parts of the world to create awareness of the importance of strengthening community ownership in evaluation and to develop an action plan for community ownership in evaluation in the Asia Pacific Region.
The highlight was participation of communities in the consultation. Two indigenous youth from India (supported by Faith Foundation) accepted the Evaluation torch. A young youth leader presented her experience in girl-led research from EMpower.
Entreculturas is a Jesuit-sponsored international cooperation NGO that works to promote justice and social transformation. It defends education as a human right and upholds the right to a dignified life for migrants and refugees. It also seeks to construct committed global citizenship, gender equality and the reconciling of humans with nature. It seeks to contribute to the development of the most vulnerable communities, appealing to values such as solidarity and equal rights, and involving all types of stakeholders (citizens, companies, governments etc.) that share the responsibility of tackling these global challenges.
For a while now, I have been pondering some key aspects that, in my experience, shape Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) practice in the Global South. It is within this context that I have decided to set out some ideas that could be incorporated into practice criteria. One of the ideas that I have focused on is the existing tension between the increasingly felt need to ensure that all voices are heard in the evaluation process and predefined evaluation criteria, both in terms of their content and use.
CRIA stands for Consorcios Regionales de Investigación Agropecuaria (Regional Consortia for Agricultural and Livestock Research). The CRIA program began in 2016 with the goal of improving agricultural and livestock research capacity across inter-organizational consortia in Guatemala. The program has been funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and implemented by the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Food (MAGA) and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in (IICA).
Every society that is victim to successive moments of crisis is severely marked and affected by previous ruptures to the terms of basic social contracts, whether economic, political or legal. In many Latin American and Caribbean countries, political institutionality is largely discredited due to the questions that surround it. Public opinion in general clearly rejects the current, past and future ruling classes. This communicates a lack of trust in political representatives and especially toward democratic institutional mechanisms that organise public activity.
was first introduced to participatory evaluation in Nicaragua. Like many people educated in the United States, I was trained in Western approaches to evaluation and research originating mostly from the social sciences. When I began working in monitoring and evaluation at a small NGO in Managua, it felt as though none of that training was relevant – largely because it was not. I did not fully understand at the time, but I now realize it was because I was trained in an epistemology or way of viewing the world that was largely out of touch with the local culture and context of the remote, rural communities where my team members and I supported health promoters to provide basic medical care in their communities. We used participatory approaches and methods including Photovoice, the Most Significant Change Technique, and Appreciative Inquiry.
The contemporary debate on evaluation and participation in humanitarian action is particularly prominent in Latin America. Multiple and diverse humanitarian contexts, crisis types and humanitarian responses exist in the region. It is also home to several study centres and researchers who discuss participation.
Citizen participation is the best way to achieve social inclusion. It is, after all, one of the goals included in the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda (SDGs). More specifically, it aims to promote peaceful and inclusive societies that can achieve sustainable development, facilitate access to justice for all people, and build effective, inclusive and accountable institutions at all levels. Gender equality is another important goal to ensure the full and effective participation of women and equal leadership opportunities at all decision-making levels in political, economic and public life.
Those of us who have facilitated participatory processes, have at some point wondered what we need to do to achieve the highest degree of involvement possible, from as many stakeholders as possible, in the activities that we plan. One of the many challenges that surface when carrying out participatory evaluation is how to create spaces for real participation where multiple stakeholders can be true protagonists in the evaluation agenda. We know that this is not achieved only by understanding in depth participatory evaluation and the methodological steps, it is also necessary to identify and be able to handle appropriate tools for each social and cultural context where the evaluation is carried out.