Learning on equity focused evaluation

[Ranjan Panda]

Kathmandu Conclave

February’ 2013

 1.       Background

Not talking much on this international event let me concentrate more towards the learning and my future plan derived from this international gathering held in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Within the series of parallel sessions, it was really a challenge to chose and attend only one session within a time frame. But as per the interest I opted mostly to attend the sessions on Equity focussed evaluation and participatory evaluation.

 2.       Learning

Although a series of evaluation I have already experienced in the last 12 years of my professional career, the concept on equity focused evaluation helped me to think differently.

The term equity was explained by the facilitators and the underlying causes of inequity were also discussed. It was explained how inequity is rooted in a complex range of political, social and economic factors with variety of reasons like gender discrimination, minority, religious discrimination, structural poverty, geographic isolation etc. Amongst these I am very much interested now to see how geographic isolation may be linked with the reach of the services to the beneficiaries with a equity angle. Within my current projects I will try to relate these factors and the effectiveness of participatory approaches in bringing the changes.

The most interesting purposes explained for undertaking the equity focused evaluation was to have the knowledge and evidence based policy advocacy. We are really working hard for preventing malnourishment and are talking about the community based approach for addressing the issues, but how the underlying reasons of inequity may be addressed through the community participation that we are not really capturing in a structured way. This perhaps leaves behind a scope to the policy makers not to design a structured well defined policy than can address malnutrition in equity angle.

I really got a link between the participatory evaluation and equity focussed evaluation. The questions designed by Robert chamber for doing participatory evaluation were remarkable. The critical questions like who thinks, who owns, who writes, who values, who designs etc to answer the participatory evaluation methods, were eye opener for the technique to follow.   

    

[Rituu B Nanda]

Thanks for sharing Ranjan! How do you plan to apply it in your work?