M&E Thursday Talk: Reciprocity in Research: Integrating Evaluation & Human Rights Methods to Balance Evaluator & Community Needs

On Thursday September 1st at 10:00am EST, as Giovanni Dazzo of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor hosted the M&E Thursday Talk Series on Reciprocity in Research: Integrating Evaluation & Human Rights Methods to Balance Evaluator & Community Needs.

  

Thursday Talk: Reciprocity in Research – Integrating Evaluation & Human Rights Methods to Balance Evaluator & Community Needs from DME for Peace on Vimeo.

(link is externWorking with vulnerable populations raises questions of reciprocity: we acquire information, but what are we giving back? The communities, activists and organizations we work with often use tactics that can easily incorporate evaluation, but we often separate the two.

In this talk, Giovanni summarized how a community consultation was structured in a way that not only collected data from former political prisoners in Burma, but also trained them on the methods used to collect their data, allowing them to use these tactics for advocacy and community organization in the future. Topics included how the evaluation team: trained participants on methods they could use; incorporated participatory methods from start (co-creating consent forms) to finish (reporting and use); and, used interactive methods—story-circles, root cause analysis, and storyboards—to show participants how to interpret data and document their own recommendations. Other tactics where evaluation can coincide with intervention—community mapping, human rights documentation—were also discussed.

About the Speaker:

Giovanni Dazzo serves as an Evaluation Specialist with the US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL). At DRL, he works closely with grantees to find creative and ethical ways to collect data and incorporate practical evaluation methods into their programming, advocacy initiatives, and human rights strategies. Prior to working with DRL, Giovanni served as an internal evaluation specialist for Freedom House’s emergency response programs for human rights defenders. He has experience as an internal and external evaluator, with the majority of this experience spent abroad conducting fieldwork with non-profits, UN agencies, bilateral donors, and development banks. His evaluation experience has primarily focused on social protection mechanisms, policy advocacy, and projects working with activists, community-based organizations and socially marginalized groups.