Reflections from Evaluation Conclave

[Rituu B Nanda]

Day one: some of the highlights for me:

Katherine Hay’s keynote speech where she touched upon violence against women in India and South Asia and the role evaluators can play in response to  this issue .  However,  keeping in mind the limited resources she underlined ‘measure what we treasure’

The panel on Gender Dynamics and Participation in Evaluation was chaired by Donna Mertens with three presentations and one from our team mate Ranjani on stakeholder participation in evaluation.  She shared several tools to encourage women to share like body mapping tool which evoked a lot of discussion. Chandra Bhadra’s example from Nepal on how women could not obtain loan from a micro-credit project because they did not know how to sign.

Appreciative Inquiry and Evaluation- workshop- Being a facilitator of a strength based approach, I enjoyed this session. The often asked question came up do strength-based approaches like AI ignore problems. Also we learned how AI has been used in drafting evaluation questions, data analysis and use of evaluation findings.

Day two:

The day had a great start with a keynote speech from Guru of Participatory evaluation- Robert Chambers. He shared ways in which PE can be quantified by sharing many tools. What stands out for me when he said that PE is all about attitudes and beliefs.

Today it was our team panel chaired by Ratna Sudarshan with Priya Nanda and Rajib Nandi as presenters and Shraddha as the discussant. We had a deep discussion on how transformative can feminist evaluation be. Rajibji's experience depicted how in a project when gender dimension is ignored but the evaluation can bring in the feminist element and change the mindset of the agency which has commissioned the evalulation.

Finally, I gained a deeper understanding on how to apply strength-based approach in evaluations.

 

Photos from the conclave:

https://gendereval.ning.com/photo/albums/engendering-policy-through...