The next session – “Real world” evaluation by Jim Rugh was very fascinating and informative session. The session has covered a lot of real issues which evaluators have to face such as when the evaluator is called when the project is near completion and there was no baseline nor comparison groups or evaluation must be conducted with inadequate budget and insufficient time and where there are political pressures and expectations for how the evaluation should be conducted and what the conclusions should say etc followed by exercise. The session covered what to do when there is no baseline, evaluation design, logic models, counterfactuals etc. Overall, they emphasized on integrated approach which combines a wide range of tools adapted to produce the best quality evaluation under Real world constraints.
Evaluation in Extremis session presented by Katherine Hay and Janaka Jayawickrama where they focused on importance of research in conflict areas or violently divide societies in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka respectively. Katherine emphasized on gaps in quality or credibility used to limit the uptake of research and poor quality research reinforces the dominant ideology or discourse used with little questioning. One of the quote from Pakistan- “Generally Government funded research institutes see their purpose as justifying government policy rather than questioning it.  The absence of credible systems or approaches to evaluate research, can reinforce and maintain the dominant discourse and obscure or render “ suspicious” or “ unreliable” the alternative analysis of experiences and realities that research can illuminate”- Saba, Pakistan. Mr. Janaka highlighted the importance of taking into account the voices of affected communities in planning and management rather than top-down approach.
Evaluating public programmes using participatory methods session presented by A J James. His focus is on representing large amounts of( qualitative) data on a single spreadsheet instead of large numbers in printed pages; integrate qualitative data with other kind of quantitative data( financial, physical etc) and compare performance over time and space. He shared couple of assignments where he has successfully shown the same.
ProLL Programm Logic Tool for M&E Planning and Implementation by Dr. Arunasalam Rasappan has shared the results framework using ProLL, dimensions of M&E using ProL; interface between programme planning, monitoring & evaluation and how to draw up a M&E plan followed by exercise. They have extensively worked with Malaysian Government and successfully introduced ProLL.
In a nutshell, learnt the importance of evaluation policies; factors to keep in mind while doing research in conflict areas and how best one can adopt and adapt in case of real world evaluations and the most important “logic model” for effective implementation. Apart from attending the sessions, many new things are shared and learnt during lunch and tea time discussion with others. As a way forward, we are going to incorporate some of the learning’s for instance learning’s of evaluation in extremis session in our current work – reduction of violence against women in conflict affected areas (Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan).