Participation is the core of our work

[Jindra Cekan, PhD]

Thank you Rituu and the whole community. A word about our questions:

1. Your name, gender and country

Jindra Cekan/ova, Female, USA and Czech Republic

2. How would you define ‘participation’ in evaluation? What does it mean for you? 

It is the core of our work, those whom we listen to, our stakeholders (partners, participants)' views must be at the center of evaluation, for how does international development serve them better unless we listen?

3. Why was it your BEST experience in implementing participatory Evaluation?

SO many... Recently, doing a post-project sustainability evaluation (in Africa), one older, district government official whom we invited to the debrief (based on a core belief - leave learning local) said "no one has ever returned after any evaluation. Could you get us money to do such evaluations ourselves?"

4. Who commission this evaluation? ( government, NGO, funding agency etc)

NGO 
5. Whom did you engage in evaluation? Why did you engage them? At what stage in evaluation? 

Participants and partners, NGO staff, donors. We are all legs of the same sustainability stool.

6. What was the process or tools you used in participatory evaluation?

Qual (RRA- focus groups, key informant interviews) supplemented by Quant household survey (gender disaggregated) and Comparison groups

7. What worked and did not work, why?

I've come to see that qual answers 'why' but as the participants are self-selected, we need to get further feedback from random quant surveys for the fuller picture.

8. How did you address the challenges?

Sequencing  is an issue - do we do the qual before the quant in sustainability evaluations (to shape the survey) or do we do it after to explain the survey findings? Both approaches have great value, it depends on what we know already...

9. What did you learn? How would you do it differently next time (approach, methodology, relation with stakeholders etc) ?

SO much to learn about how to evaluate sustained and emerging impact via post project evaluations! See more about SEIE at www.ValuingVoices.com 

Much more to learn about what SDGs monitor and how attribute results, build national 'evaluative thinking' capacity... Thanks for asking! 

[Rituu B Nanda]

Thanks Jindra! I have put this as a response to the main discussion here http://gendereval.ning.com/forum/topics/query-your-best-experience-...