Board Member Community of Evaluators - South Asia, India
Lessons learned from the Covid 19 pandemic set the stage for further discussion about reorienting perspectives and methods towards democratizing evaluation. In the given context, the recent debates focused on how the evaluators could be better facilitators to both design the evaluation and leverage from this new system - engage and empower communities - maximise the learning from the engagements with the communities and bring a transformative change as far as equality and people's wellbeing are concerned. As a result of all these questions, evaluation thinkers revisited the existing questions regarding evaluators' competencies and came up with relevant ideas. The paper argues that it is an appropriate time to rethink evaluation designing by highlighting the importance of reducing the eco-chamber effects; and empowering the local level organisations in co-designing both the humanitarian programmes and evaluations from a broader perspective of transforming both evaluation practices and societies. This paper focuses mainly on the experiences, challenges, learning and opportunities on engaging the communities in designing and executing evaluation, with equal importance on principles and ethics of evaluations. This paper concludes that the future direction of the evaluation must come from unheard grassroot stories which can enrich the process of evaluation and democratize it.
