On March 19, 2015 the Network for Peacebuilding Evaluation and Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium were pleased to have hosted a Thursday Talk with Bosun Jang, Monitoring & Evaluation Officer of the UNICEF Peacebuilding, Education, and Advocacy (PBEA) Program, and Dr. Ann Doucette, director of the Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness and research professor at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, who discussed Developmental Evaluation in UNICEF’s PBEA Program.
This presentation described UNICEF’s Peacebuilding, Education, and Advocacy (PBEA) program, a 14-country global initiative that aims to develop social cohesion, resilience, and human security through strengthened practices and policies in education in conflict-affected contexts. The complexities of the program—its global nature, nexus between peacebuilding and education, post-conflict contexts, and lofty goals of hard-to-measure social values—introduced a healthy challenge in program M&E. Creative measures around surveys and case studies helped capture the processes and outcomes of peacebuilding, but did not ensure systematic documentation of key developments that occur in between, instant feedback of lessons learned, and dedicated reflections for midcourse corrective action. In response to such needs, UNICEF has launched pilot developmental evaluation (DE) in Myanmar (and soon Ethiopia). Although currently at a nascent stage, the experience has already begun to infuse into UNICEF an institutional learning that it could rarely afford, including embracing of complexities and failures, establishment of learning objectives, and sensitization around regular reflective practices.
Recording and Transcript:
M&E Thursday Talk: Peacebuilding Education and Advocacy Program, UNICEF from DME for Peace on Vimeo.
Please click here for the powerpoint (link is external).
Check back soon for a written summary!
About the Speakers:
Dr. Ann Doucette is the director of The Evaluators’ Institute (September 2008), director of the Midge Smith Center for Evaluation Effectiveness, and a research professor at Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, Washington, DC. She has broad experience in the management, analysis, and evaluation of diverse intervention programs, the development of accountability and outcomes monitoring systems at individual and system levels; research methodology, data collection strategies, psychometric and measurement techniques, and applied statistical analysis, including both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Dr. Doucette has been a TEI faculty member since 2003, and teaches Applied Measurement for Evaluation and Making Evaluation Data Actionable.
Bosun Jang has six years of experience in program evaluation, information management (IM), and data analytics. Presently as the Monitoring and Evaluation Officer of the UNICEF Peacebuilding, Education, and Advocacy (PBEA) Program (link is external), she leads the global aggregation and reporting of results from 14 country, five regional, and seven sectoral programs to illustrate education’s contribution to building social cohesion, resilience, and human security in conflict-affected contexts. Prior to UNICEF, Bosun worked at Deloitte Consulting, Westat, and Family Health International 360 (FHI 360), where she provided M&E services to a wide spectrum of clients, including thee World Bank, UN agencies, and government agencies in South Sudan, Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, and the US. SHe also co-runs a monthly discussion forum, Chat Over Coffee (link is external), which aims to promote friendship between Japan and Korea through open dialogues around the two countries’ historical tensions and ongoing controversies. Bosun is a proud alumnus of Vanderbilt University Peabody College with a M.Ed. in International Education Policy and Management.