Resource Feeds

The Fourth Session of the Global Platform for Disaster risk Reduction aims to continue the momentum of the prior Global Platform meetings, into a durable and sustained effort from all actors (governments, NGOs and civil society, international agencies and organizations, academic and technical institutions, and the private sector) to take shared responsibility in reducing risks and reinforcing resilience in our communities. The Fourth Session will also be an opportunity to progress and consult on the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA). ODI researchers are speaking at different events during the conference.

I’m Clara Hagens. I work for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as the Regional Technical Advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning in Asia. I’d like to share with you a guidance document we have developed to support project teams to operationalize monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plans, big and small, in various contexts.

Rad Resource: CRS’ Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation covers a range of topics related to basic M&E concepts and to designing and implementing M&E activities. The topics include gender in M&E, random and purposeful sampling, developing qualitative data collection tools, M&E in emergencies, and community participation in M&E to name a few. Each topic is grounded in a set of standards to guide our M&E practice. The standards are accompanied by narrative to explain how each can be achieved, tips and good practices, examples, and planning tables and templates.

For example, the Guidance provides standards for Community Participation in M&E that state that M&E systems track the changes most important to communities and communities participate in data collection and in the interpretation of M&E results and includes tips for each step in the process. The standards for Planning and Conducting an Evaluation refer to the importance of developing project-specific evaluation questions related to the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability. The Guidance also includes a simple evaluation planning table which helps teams to link the methods for data collection and respondents to the evaluation questions.

(Share Clip)

The CRS Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation is appropriate for project teams who are looking for additional hands-on support to further engage with their M&E systems. I hope you will find this useful!

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Related posts:

1. PD CoP Week: Donna Campell on Evaluating Professional Development: Guskey Level 3 – Organizational Support and Learning
2. Chris Camillo on Improving Monitoring Systems from an Auditor’s Perspective
3. Greg Lestikow and Fatima Frank on Three Basic Evaluation Presentations

La OEA y los países de Latinoamérica están contribuyendo positivamente para romper el tabú que ha silenciado por tanto tiempo el debate acerca de una política de drogas más humana y eficaz.

Changes are afoot! My name is Susan Kistler and I am just about to become the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director emeritus. I’ve written before about my stepping down and my last official day in this position is this coming Monday, May 20. I’ll continue to write for aea365, and will be working on the Evaluation 2013 conference program, but will be moving on to new and exciting opportunities and serving AEA primarily in a volunteer capacity. The new staff team coming on board brings a breadth and depth of knowledge of management and communications that represents a significant increase in AEA’s organizational capacity. I can’t wait to see what new things come about in the months ahead.

Rad Resource – Denise Roosendaal: AEA is searching for a permanent Executive Director (see the position description here). In the meantime, Denise Roosendaal, CAE, is the interim ED and may be reached at droosendaal@eval.org. Denise brings to the position twenty-five years of experience in running nonprofits and associations and she can’t wait to get to know more about AEA and evaluation. If you are attending the Summer Institute next month in Atlanta, be sure to stop by the registration desk and to say “hello.”

Lessons Learned – What to Expect: You likely won’t see major changes in AEA’s programs and services in the near-term and only improvements in the long-term.  aea365 will continue to come out daily under the watchful eye of Sheila Robinson, our lead volunteer curator (she may be reached at aea365@eval.org). The association will have a new phone number (1-202-367-1166) but the old one will forward until the end of June. There will be new voices on the other end of the phones, but with the same commitment to serving AEA. We ask that you are patient in the next few weeks as the new staff gets up to speed. If they don’t know the answer, they’ll find it and get back to you expeditiously.

Get Involved – Share Your Ideas: Have a great idea for something new for AEA? Email Denise at droosendaal@eval.org or put it in the comments on aea365.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Related posts:

1. FIE/MME Week: Donna Podems on Applying Feminist Evaluation for Non-feminist Evaluators

In an open letter, former Latin American leaders call for legal regulation to help undermine organised crime

A la fin des années 2000, la Turquie espérait que son dynamisme économique, la bonne image et la pugnacité de son premier ministre, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, et l'admiration de ses voisins pour son modèle, qui allie démocratie et islam, lui apporteraient prospérité et influence au Moyen-Orient.

Hello, I am Vanessa Hiratsuka, secretary of the Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) and a senior researcher at Southcentral Foundation (SCF), a tribally owned and managed regional health corporation based in Anchorage, Alaska, which serves Alaska Native and American Indian people.

As part of Commitment to Quality, a key organizational value, Southcentral Foundation (SCF) prioritizes continuous quality improvement (CQI), quality assurance, program evaluation, and research.

Although the strategies and tools used in CQI, quality assurance, program evaluation, and research are similar, we do different things. One of our challenges is to help staff across the organization understand who does what. Because these four fields differ in aim and audience, exploring the goals of a project (aim) and who will use its findings (audience) provides a useful framework to determine where a project fits.

At SCF, improvement staff work directly with SCF department and clinic processes to develop and implement project performance measures and outcome indicators as well as help staff (audience) improve processes to better meet customer-owner needs and inform business directions (aim).  Quality Assurance staff conduct quality monitoring to ensure programs are complying (aim) with SCF processes and the requirements of our accrediting bodies (internal and external audiences).

SCF internal evaluators measure programs’ performance (aim) and provide feedback to programmatic stakeholders — including staff, leadership, and funders (audience). The SCF research department’s projects address questions of clinical significance to contribute to generalizable knowledge (aim) for use within SCF and for dissemination in the scientific literature around American Indian and Alaska Native health (audience).

Lessons Learned:

-        Define the aim and intended audience early in the process! This helps identify the stakeholders, level of review, and oversight needed during all stages of a project, including development, implementation, and dissemination of findings.

-        Broadly disseminate findings! Findings and recommendations from all disciplines are only useful when they are shared. At SCF, findings are shared at interdivisional committee meetings and with staff who oversee the work of departments. Multipronged dissemination ensures involvement from all levels of SCF and supports innovation and the spread of new knowledge.

-        Project review can be complicated!  At SCF, research projects must be vetted through a tribal concept review phase, an Institutional Review Board review, and finally a tribal review of the proposal.  Later, all research dissemination products (abstracts for presentation, manuscripts, and final reports) are also required to undergo a tribal research review process. These take time, so it is important to understand the processes and timelines and build review time into your project management timelines.

Check out these posts on understanding evaluation:

1. 1.    Gisele Tchamba on Learning the Difference between Evaluation and Research
2. 2.    John LaVelle on Describing Evaluation

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Related posts:

1. ACA Week: Jennifer Novak-Leonard on Audience Impact
2. Sara Plachta Elliott on Sparking Collective Learning
3. Wilder Research Week: Dan Swanson on Data Quality

'With these elections, Pakistan has taken an important step towards democracy, but to transform the country in more fundamental ways will require more than (recycled) electoral promises.'

The BBC's Why Poverty project was a unique attempt by a UK broadcaster to engage mainstream audiences with the issue of global poverty. In this public event, we'll examine how successful the project was and ask what lessons can be learnt for any future attempts to engage the public, both in the UK and around the world, with poverty and development. We also reflect on what we've learnt from broader analysis into public opinion and public engagement.

Legal challenges to the close 14 April presidential election and the government’s reluctance to commit to a full review cast a shadow over the sustainability of the new administration in an already deeply polar-ised Venezuela.

Greetings! My name is kas aruskevich and I am principal of Evaluation Research Associates LLC. I live in Fairbanks and work primarily in rural Alaska. Alaska is known for its great natural beauty, extreme temperatures, and unique context of diverse and far-flung communities assessable only by air. Alaska is the largest state in the U.S.

Rural communities often have a small population and rarely have a local evaluator for hire. Consequently, a program evaluator is most often hired from outside the community or region. Helicopter evaluation is a depreciating term used to describe a drop in – evaluate – depart approach. Today’s post talks about methods to strengthen and add depth to evaluations that involve distance between evaluator and evaluand.

Hot Tip: First, context is important. Familiarize yourself with the community and region before you travel. Gather demographic data of the community, leading industry, and cultural composition. Learn about the organization hosting the program, before your first contact. Plan your site-visit around a community event so you can see the community in a broader context.

Rad Resource: The importance of context is discussed in New Directions for Evaluation Fall 2012, Issue 135.

Hot Tip: Next, work to build open communication with program staff. Begin with a teleconference to provide an opportunity to meet staff and organization and discuss program status. Teleconferences also give you a chance to describe your evaluation style and see if you are a ‘fit’ for the organization and the evaluation project.

ALWAYS include participatory methods. I don’t ‘come in’ as the expert with an unchangeable evaluation design, but instead write up suggestions for the evaluation to negotiate before a plan is finalized. As an itinerant evaluator you can’t be on site as often as you might like. Using a participatory evaluation approach, program staff can be involved in the evaluation through taking photos or identifying program participants or stakeholders to interview.

Rad Resource – Read more about participatory evaluation in Cousins and Chouinard’s new book Participatory Evaluation Up Close.

Hot Tip: Lastly, work to build a friendly relationship based on mutual interests with at least one person in the organization or community. After years of conducting evaluations, friendly relationships have evolved into continuing friendships. These friendships have mutual benefits, in-part, they are a bridge for the evaluator to learn community specific cultural protocols–very important to conduct evaluations in cross-cultural settings – which in turn can strengthen the program through appropriate evaluation.

Lesson Learned: Itinerant evaluation can be much more than a helicopter site-visit approach. Regular communication and working together with program staff as a team can expand the evaluative evidence collected and increase report credibility, relevance, and use by the program staff.

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Related posts:

1. Internal Eval Week: Kathleen Norris on the Internal Evaluation Boa
2. CP TIG Bonus: Susan Wolfe on Using Performance Data to Empower Staff and Build Capacity
3. Internal Evaluation Week: Debbie Cohen on Working with External Evaluators

This  ODI, Development Finance International and Oxfam event will launch Government Spending Watch – a new database that tracks what developing country governments are spending on achieving the MDGs.

Robert Satloff and David Schenker of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy describe conceivable contingencies that pose serious threats to Jordan's stability and provide recommendations on how U.S. policymakers can help manage potentially destabilizing economic and political change in the country.

Posted by Lewis Murara and Christopher Iles[i] A major decision faced by many countries is what sort of Financial Management Information System (FMIS) they should develop to support their PFM reform efforts. The decision is more difficult in low-capacity countries...

Though the 2013 general elections were relatively peaceful, Kenya is still deeply divided and ethnically polarised.

We are Alexandra Hill and Diane Hirshberg, and we are part of the Center for Alaska Education Policy Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  The evaluation part of our work ranges from tiny projects – just a few hours spent helping someone design their own internal evaluation – to rigorous and formal evaluations of large projects.

In Alaska, we often face the challenge of conducting evaluations with very small numbers of participants in small, remote communities. Even in Anchorage, our largest city, there are only 300,000 residents. We also work with very diverse populations, both in our urban and rural communities. Much of our evaluation work is on federal grants, which need to both meet federal requirements for rigor and power, and be culturally responsive across many settings.

Lesson Learned: Using mixed-methods approaches allows us to both 1) create a more culturally responsive evaluation; and 2) provide useful evaluation information despite small “sample” sizes. Quantitative analyses often have less statistical power in our small samples than in larger studies, but we don’t simply want to accept lower levels of statistical significance, or report ‘no effect’ when low statistical power is unavoidable.

Rather, we start with a logic model to ensure we’ve fully explored pathways through which the intervention being evaluated might work, and those through which it might not work as well.  This allows us to structure our qualitative data collection to explore and examine the evidence for both sets of pathways.  Then we can triangulate with quantitative results to provide our clients with a better sense of how their interventions are working.

At the same time, the qualitative side of our evaluation lets us lets us build in measures that are responsive to local cultures, include and respect local expertise, and (when we’re lucky) build bridges between western academic analyses and indigenous knowledge. Most important, it allows us to employ different and more appropriate ways of gathering and sharing information across indigenous and other diverse communities. 

Rad Resource: For those of you at universities or other large institutions that can purchase access to it we recommend SAGE Research Methods.  This online resource provides access to full text versions of most SAGE research publications, including handbooks of research, encyclopedias, dictionaries, journals, and ALL the Little Green Books and Little Blue Books.

Rad Resource: Another Sage-sponsored resource is Methodspace, an online network for researchers. Sign-up is free, and Methodspace posts selected journal articles, book chapters and other resources, as well as hosting online discussions and blogs about different research methods.

Rad Resource: For developing logic models, we recommend the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Logic Model Development Guide.

(Share Clip)

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Alaska Evaluation Network (AKEN) Affiliate Week. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AKEN members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Related posts:

1. AKEN Week: Amelia Ruerup on Understanding Indigenous Evaluation in an Alaskan Context
2. AKEN Week: Corrie Whitmore Introducing the Alaska Evaluation Network
3. AKEN Week: Alda Norris on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Extension Evaluation in Alaska

في أواخر العام 2000، أملت تركيا أن تتمكن من خلال ازدهار الاقتصاد، ومكانة رئيس الوزراء المناضل رجب الطيب أردوغان، وظهور استحسان إقليمي للمزيج الناجح في البلاد بين حوكمة إسلامية وديموقراطية، أن تكتسب النفوذ والمنفعة في الشرق الأوسط.

This paper considers the options available for resource-rich developing countries when deciding whether to implement special fiscal institutions to address some of the challenges of managing natural resource wealth.

This paper investigates the origins and drivers of fiscal institutions by studying the history of finance ministries. It argues that finance ministries have their origins in early modern Europe, where they served as agents of spending control to support inter-state warfare. This legacy still shapes the fiscal institutions of today.

The ODI and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Overseas Development (APGOOD) host a panel discussion on Africa’s economic progress and the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative, bringing together a balanced group of panellists with diverse experiences and backgrounds.