"I am going to analyse the data with statistics". "I am going to apply statistical thinking to my data". "I am going to use logistic regression to analyse my data". The first statement is true but useful only to point at a realm of
More than 60 evaluation reports over 13 years by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR): a perfect example of evaluation’s power, and its powerlessness. The damage done — hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars — when evaluation evidence is ignored.
"Between me and not-me there is surely a line, a clear distinction, or so it seems. But, now that I look, where is that line?" Donella Meadows, 1987. Blue Marble Evaluation. It is good to have been engaged in it from the beginning, and to be on
I re-post this post - originally published on Evidence Matters of EvalPartners - as illustration of an integrated approach to determining and understanding individual capacity development and empowerment, using theory-based evaluation as well as a tailored "Four Powers" framework with the awesome acronym AWSEM. A side note: we
I am re-posting here a blog post I wrote in 2017 (Part 5 in my DAC Evaluation Criteria series). I want to highlight aspects of what I had written at the time, not about the criteria as such, but to reinforce some of the arguments I made about the
The guidance is an important step. The updated criteria have even more easy-to-ignore demands stacked under each one. For more about the debates around their merit and usefulness, see my critical 2018 blog post series on the DAC criteria. The posts solicited many thoughtful comments from around the
We need Mission Thinking, Moonshot Thinking, and Mission-Oriented Evaluation if we are to ensure evaluation is fit for purpose for this era. The thought occurred to me as I was reading the latest book by visionary and outspoken UK economist Mariana Mazzucato, who is on a mission to establish
I hope you will appreciate this interesting and pertinent blog post. I was in Beijing in 2003 at the inaugural meeting of IDEAS. Still quite new to evaluation, I was told that the impressive person taking the floor was famous in development evaluation circles. Our subsequent interactions over the years
I connected with Daniel in 2019 when I was given access to a draft of the GIZ paper he discusses here. I found it more insightful than most - and important. A single intervention is seldom sufficient for systems transformation, but we know an intervention can be designed and implemented in
Osvaldo is one of the most knowledgeable professionals I have ever met - a veritable walking encyclopaedia of all matters related to evaluation. Over the years it has been a feast for me to meet up and occasionally work with him, among others as members of the International Evaluation Advisory Committee
