64 - Fleshy Evaluations: Feminist storytelling, African youth, and the rehumanization of development

Abstract Information: By 2030, one in every five people in the world will live on the African continent. Majority will be young people under the age of 30. While it is imperative that these young people are provided with opportunities to live their lives fully and meaningfully, the development space remains void of their voices, especially during creative processes when interventions, programmes, and initiatives that affect them are shaped. As young women from Africa and emerging evaluators, we propose that in order to bring youth alongside as co-creators, we must intentionally seek out their stories. In this presentation, we will demonstrate how storytelling as an evaluative tool critically seeks to harness voices of those who have traditionally been and remain sidelined in development theory and practice - including adolescents, women, and people with disabilities. In accordance, through a feminist storytelling lens, we will show how stories have shaped key recommendations that we have put forth to our clients, as well as how stories have illustrated the depth and impact of development programs. First, we will explore the intersection between storytelling, evaluation and feminism as a tool. We will  ‘enflesh’ our theory through the provision of two case studies: We will (1) share stories of the effect of critically engaging communities in shaping social and child protection programs (in particular a disability policy) in rural Kenya and (2) indicate how stories captured the depth of impact of an entrepreneurship support programme in helping youth successfully navigate the impacts of Covid-19 in Uganda. We hope, in conclusion, to show the liberatory power of how the often feared, complex, emotive, and subjective nature of stories, is in fact a key tool in rehumanizing development, and therefore the practice of evaluation.

Relevance Statement: Despite the increasing acknowledgment of the importance of incorporating end user voices in shaping development programs, ‘power holders’, including development partners, governments and policy makers, have traditionally demanded and continue to value numbers and ‘clean data’, so to speak, over the more subjective, messy, lived experiences of the end users of development programs. However, it is no secret that numbers often leave out the face and the humanity of individuals, and they as end users are continuously robbed of the opportunity to meaningfully shape and demand for interventions that they want and consider effective. Evaluators, the connective tissue between end users of programs and power holders, are in a unique position to influence the sorts of data that our clients demand and have access to. We (Lauren and Catherine) are not only enthusiastic about the power of storytelling but we (including our company) have also continuously advocated for the incorporation of more in depth qualitative narratives in the work that we do and the methodologies that we propose to our clients. In this presentation, we illustrate how stories are incorporated into our evaluations to shape key outcomes and the recommendations that we put forth to our clients. We discuss both the benefits but also and more importantly the challenges of using such narratives in evaluation work, especially when working with governments and policy makers who often prefer shorter to the point outcomes. We zoom into and embrace the ‘messiness’ of stories and the often ‘feared’ complexities that come with such qualitative narratives. Ultimately, we show how we have grappled with this data to consequently draw meaningful conclusions from it for our clients. We are intimately aware of the growing field of feminist MEL and its value in emerging fields such as storytelling. In this presentation, we further illustrate how stories shift power structures between the researcher (evaluator/development partners) and the researched (end users of development programs/young people). We illustrate how an invitation to share one’s lived experience shades light on and contextualises the depth of impact of development programs and how this can be valuable for clients. And lastly, we illustrate how we have incorporated stories to not only tell a fuller evaluation story but to also enrich key client outputs. Our presentation will be divided into a prologue-where we introduce storytelling as a feminist evaluation tool and strategy that uses the feminine tradition of storytelling and familial friendship as an epistemological source, body- where we share stories from our work and explore how we have drawn meaning from them and consequently enriched client outputs, and epilogue- where we share how our own lived experiences, as African youth working in the development space and passionate about the transformation of the continent, shape our interest in the use of stories in evaluations.