Approaches

IPDET was designed to meet the needs of evaluation and audit units of many different types of organizations involved in development work. This comprehensive international program is designed to help a range of development specialists conduct significant evaluations of development interventions at the project, program, and policy levels....

In this interview, Sharon Morris, Director of the Youth & Conflict Division at Mercy Corps, reflects on recent progress and achievements made in the advancement of peacebuilding design, monitoring and evaluation. She praises the maturation thus far of peacebuilding DM&E, and implores practitioners to have more faith and confidence that our approaches will be validated by the evidence collected through evaluation....

Since the 1990s, internationally-supported peacebuilding interventions have become increasingly prominent. Activities focusing on rule of law and security institutions are a key component of this agenda. Despite increasing calls for more rigorous analysis of the impact of peacebuilding interventions, conceptual advances have been limited....

Realist evaluation is a species of theory-driven evaluation. Some of the differences between it and fellow members of the genus (programme theory evaluation, theories-of-change evaluation) will be noted in the course of the section. What should be stressed in the first instance, however, is the commonality....

This Guide describes the steps that are taken to initiate an evaluation after management makes the decision to proceed. First, terms of reference (TORs) are prepared by CIDA’s evaluation manager and then an evaluator is selected. ...

The primary purpose of this manual is to help communities improve the quality of their programs aimed at preventing or reducing drug use among youth. Funders are increasingly mandating “accountability” for the public or private funds they provide by demanding high-quality outcome data to determine the success of programs....

  Many bodies aim to mainstream gender, but few track how effective they are in doing so with monitoring and evaluation.  The mechanisms used to monitor and evaluate development programmes, projects and policies have so far been largely gender blind....

When we talk about the current state of DM&E in the peacebuilding field, we often lament the fact that we do not have an established evidence base of what works, and that our methodological approaches are still not that sophisticated compared with other disciplines such as education and health....

This paper shares the first results of an ongoing collaborative action research in which ten development organisations explored different Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (PME) approaches with the aim of dealing more effectively with complex processes of social change....

Citizens’ capacity to express and exercise their views is a vital part of poverty reduction. States that can be held accountable for their actions are more likely to respond to the different needs and demands of the public. Citizen voice and accountability (V&A) work has emerged as a priority in the international development agenda, and is part of the broader debate about the importance of governance in improving prospects for poor people....

This document aims to be a guide to help to direct the design of a Theory of Change applied to social change processes. However, it is an initial approach that must be furthered based on new experiences and practical applications. ...

This TIPS has three purposes. First, it provides guidance for evaluators on the structure, content, and style of evaluation reports. Second, it offers USAID officials, who commission evaluations, ideas on how to define the main deliverable. Third, it provides USAID officials with guidance on reviewing and approving evaluation reports. ...

This guide aims to assist evaluators and their clients in the process of engaging stakeholders—those with a stake or interest in the program, policy, or initiative being evaluated. The guide should assist philanthropy, but also the field of evaluation more generally, as it seeks to increase the value and usefulness of evaluation. ...

Evaluation of psychosocial programmes can be carried out for a variety reasons. It is the nature of these reasons that determines what is exactly is evaluated, what criteria and which methods are used. In this article, the focus is on evaluation as a pathway to learn from experience and develop expertise....

The Africa Program for Education Impact Evaluation seeks to build in-country capacity to develop and implement rigorous evaluation of policy interventions to improve schooling outcomes, particularly students’ learning achievement. The objective is to provide policy makers with solid evidence to shape education programs and position them to deliver results on the ground....

This paper identifies the existing literature on participatory monitoring and evaluation, with a particular emphasis on gaining wide-ranging beneficiary feedback.  Comment on the coverage, scalability, risks, benefits and applicability. ...

This publication aims to contribute to the international debate on how the evaluation function can contribute to achieving equitable development results by conceptualizing, designing, implementing and using evaluations focused on human rights and equity. ...

As part of ongoing efforts to improve the quality and impact of its work, the World Bank is placing new emphasis on the use of performance monitoring indicators. These indicators, which are based on a logical framework of project objectives and endmeans relationships,  help generate more thoughtful, logically constructed  project designs....

Our evaluation experiences matter – to ourselves and to those we engage with during the evaluation. But to what extent do these evaluations contribute to changing the lives of the people we work with? To what extent are evaluations useful? Can the findings be used and can evaluations be influential in bringing about change? What are the consequences of the decisions we make around an evaluation? Making evaluations matter to the primary intended users of development programmes or initiatives and other key stakeholders is at the heart of this document. ...

Consistently, development agencies are required to improve their performance, not only at the project level but also at the programme and institutional level. This requires strengthening learning capabilities. One logical way to do so is to seek to enrich evaluation practices....