My name is Alexey Kuzmin and I am the President of the Process Consulting Company based in Moscow, Russia.
Lesson Learned: I often work internationally and believe that the best (if not the only) way to conduct a quality evaluation outside your home country is to involve local (national) consultants. Local specialists have an in-depth understanding of the local situation (political context, socio-economic environment, culture) and can help to make evaluation most relevant in terms of the overall design, methods and tools, and data analysis. They speak the local language and can interview any informant without an interpreter, which is a huge benefit in the terms of data quality. Finally, they better understand how things work in their country and can assist with the evaluation logistics.
The question is: how to find a local consultant in the country you have not been to before?
Rad Resources: I would propose two resources that may help:
1) The International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE) website has links to dozens of evaluation associations around the world. The website has an interactive map that makes it easy to find out if there is an association in the country you are going to. You may contact local evaluators through their respective national/regional associations.
2) XCeval is a listserv for persons interested in issues associated with international and cross-cultural evaluation. It was initially set up for the International and Cross-Cultural Topical Interest Group of the American Evaluation Association. Many of the postings are announcements of short-term consultancies or full-time positions in international M&E-related jobs. It also features exchanges of ideas of current interest to persons involved in the evaluation of international development.
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Many thanks to Jim Rugh for bringin this to my attention. In addition to the benefits mentioned by Kuzmin. It is an indirect way of supporting local and potentailly sustainable evaluation capacity in host countries. This is not aimed (as perceived by slelctive few) at putting you out of a job but it builds a useful supportive netwrok that you can refer colleagues to get similar or more support. As a win – win situation this complements our effort toward evaluation capacity development. The monitoring & evaluation Network Nigeria has been helping in making simlar matches at no costs to help members benefit from such consultancy opportunities and assist Internatinal experts access local capcity that will play key role in their planned initiatives. I believe many IOCE membership will gladly support such intiatives. Evaluations that embed the two sides is highly likely to be used by commissioners and locals. In addition it has potentials to influence others locally. This quite a brilliant and ethically sound idea.