by Carmen Lucía Jaramillo
The invitation we received to share the experience of designing the first participatory evaluation promoted from within the public sector in Ecuador represented a challenge both for me, as the facilitator of the process, and for Joselyn Corrales, who at that time was serving as Undersecretary for Evaluation in the state body responsible for evaluation.
The challenge lay in communicating clearly not only the methodological and conceptual aspects, but also the uncertainties, challenges and lessons learned arising from the design of the participatory evaluation of the Socialisation and Meeting Spaces for Older Adults, an intervention implemented by the Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion.
Over the past two decades, the movement aimed at achieving evidence-based policies has gained importance and prominence. It holds that policymakers should base their decisions on the best available evidence regarding “what works,” rather than on ideologies or in response to particular interests.
When I wrote 
From very early on in my professional training, I saw human rights as a tool for challenging and transforming ethically unjust realities. Accordingly, when I graduated as a psychologist, I did not focus on addressing people’s suffering on an individual basis, but rather on understanding it in its collective dimension, designing strategies that sought to transform the social conditions that generate this discomfort.
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.
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 
The term “experience capitalisation” is increasingly used to refer to the process of describing and analysing a project, programme or specific experience in detail, and producing lessons that can be shared and used to improve development interventions.
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.
As outlined in the 