Storytelling and High Impact Evaluative Practices (Agency, Voice, Accountability, Empowerment): Emerging Lessons Learned from the AfrEA and AEA Democracy, Rights & Governance (DRG) TIG Sister Collaboration on High Impact Evaluative Practices.

Abstract:  This panel session provides the story and lessons learned via story of the Sister Organization relationship between the AEA’s Democracy, Rights and Governance TIG with the African Evaluation Association.  This new, innovative mechanism based on the Sister City Model implements international engagement at a community of practice level around democracy support utilizing the power of story, co-development and co-learning to improve evaluative practices.  Panelists will provide a coordinated set of presentations that address how going beyond North-South and rigor-indigenous knowledge binaries produces gains in high impact evaluative practices, including recent initiatives and case studies of the AfrEA and lessons learned through the sister-to-sister model of long-term collaboration.

Relevance to the AEA.  This proposed session both supports and builds on the AEA 2016 International Engagement Strategy.  It supports the AEA and AEA Strategy, which (formed in 1986) is the oldest voluntary organization of professional evaluators (VOPE) and as such, as always been engaged globally.  The AEA has as its values a global and international evaluation community and understanding of evaluation practices, excellence in evaluation practice, and inclusion and diversity in the evaluation community and is a founding member of the IOCE and has joined to support EvalPartners. The AEA Democracy, Rights and Governance (DRG) Thematic Interest Group shares these values. While democracy support evaluation has been a community of practice since the National Endowment for Democracy was formed in 1983, the DRG TIG was organized within the AEA in 2015 to share best practices about DRG evaluation in developing countries. About one in five of our members are located globally. It also builds and expands this Strategy in what we believe to be an historic “first” – a “Sister Association” relationship that is new to the AEA.  We are piloting a new mechanism that builds on the AEA International Engagement Strategy at a community of practice level.  Our DRG TIG members have participated in previous one-off study tours and engagements with groups of individual global evaluators and individuals have presented at each other’s conferences over the past nearly decade or so. But to our knowledge, no other longer-term sister relationship has been established.  Many AEA DRG TIG member evaluators have worked individually with African evaluators and on African-based evaluation projects, and a Kenyan-based African evaluator (Jerim Obure) is on our TIG Board and leading this initiative.  This new model also allies closely with the values of the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) which is working on a number of DRG projects.  We (the AEA DRG TIG and AfrEA0 are utilizing  the Sister Cities model – which we call “Sister Associations” as we believe it best suits the kind of relationship we aim for to share intellectual capital as co-equals at the early stages of what we also anticipate (hopefully) will be a longer term, closer and productive relationship in ways that promote international evaluation networks at multiple levels. Sister relationships focus on the long term rather than being limited by a specific formal MOU and thus encourages organic growth, learning and co-development as conversations, stories, networks and opportunities emerge through engagement and collaboration. We believe this new mechanism will be of considerable interest to the AEA strategically, institutionally and across a variety of AEA TIGs.
Relevance to the Profession.  This proposed session is timely and relevant to the current “evidence moment” paradigm shift that is both a U.S. and a global movement for two reasons.  First, within Africa, a large cadre of evaluators have emerged who are highly trained methodologically, statistically and technologically, in part due to twin efforts of the United Nations to create national evaluation policies and the African focus on preventing and addressing the HIV/AIDs crises.  Yet many of these African evaluators are new to working in the DRG field and peer colleague sharing of work, methods, and challenges between the U.S.-based AEA DRG TIG and the Africa-based AfrEA would benefit the profession enormously within both sets of associations.  Second, the “evidence moment” is more than just a set of policy changes (e.g., the U.S. Evidence Act of 2018) and this proposed session provides a new mechanism to explore the emerging paradigm cross-culturally and cross-association in ways that will advance the profession.  Specifically, U.S. evaluators have much to learn from the “Made in Africa” initiative of the AfrEA.  Professionally, the evidence moment reflects a convergence of evaluation and social impact approaches, smart designs and the rating of programs by strength of the evidence, use of mixed methods over the rigid “gold standard” model (e.g., RCTs),  digital shared measurement platforms over “standard indicators,” public-private partnerships for programs and financing, responsible data over open data, systems and markets rather than single factor approaches, human-centered and participatory designs rather than inflexible, top-down logrames, new focuses on cross-cutting and contextualized factors (e.g., gender-responsive and inclusive programming, fragile environments, capacity building), and new ways to include the evaluator as a partner rather than an end-of-project ex post facto external evaluator.  All of these changes reflect a new approach to rigor that sharing lessons learned between the AEA DRG TIG and DRG leaders within the AfrEA will prove informative to the profession of evaluation and evaluation standards.
Relevance to the Field.  While the DRG field of practice has been around for 40 years, the field has only recently “professionalized.”  This is because until the late 1990s, it was assumed that democratization occurred naturally in waves and did not require interventions that needed to be evaluated for effectiveness and monitored for unintended consequences.  From the U.S. side, many of the subfields were approached in stovepipe fashion (e.g., elections, parliamentary strengthening, political parties, rule of law and so forth) without a systems perspective. This approach has evolved substantially in the past two decades not only in response to closing spaces and rising authoritarianism in the developing world,  but also due to recent events and challenges within the U.S. and other established western democracies that reflect a global trend of democratic backsliding.  The AEA DRG TIG has been publishing online blog articles about these new approaches in AEA 365 over the past five years, and in 2023, AEA DRG TIG members collaborated on a series of articles summarizing the history of the DRG evaluation field and discussing new methodologies and tools in AEA’s New Directions for Evaluation. The AEA DRG TIG believes it – and the AEA – has much to learn by developing practice-based sharing and learning opportunities at a community of practice level with the AfrEA.  For this reason, we believe this session providing initial lessons learned to be highly relevant to the field.
In sum, we believe that this session’s high relevance will advance the anticipated outcomes of the AEA Theory of Change for internationalization and global peer learning for the AEA and AfrEA, for the profession and for the field:

• Governments used evidence-based, robust arguments in policy advocacy, with attention to equity and gender equality;


• Civil society and VOPES increase their legitimacy and influence;


• The international community supports the use of evaluation in policymaking; and


•  VOPEs become a global coalition promoting high evaluation standards.