Hi, my name is Jeanette Tocol and I am a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Advisor at the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI). One of my primary roles at ABA ROLI is to oversee evaluations. I find that many of the evaluations we commission focus on establishing the linkage between capacity building and policy changes in the democracy, rights and governance sector.
I am Francis Mwaijande, former Chairman of Tanzania Evaluation Association (TanEA) and the Principal Investigator (P.I) of Democratizing Learning and Evaluation-Supporting evaluation ecosystems and opportunities for contextualized approaches: Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE). I’m grateful to the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) and the U.S. Department of State who provided research support for this project to examine an inventory of scholarship in Africa-rooted evaluation approaches. MAE, “birthed” in the 2007 AfrEA Conference in Niami, was formally articulated by AfrEA in 2021 in a set of African Evaluation Principles designed to guide evaluation from an African perspective.
Hello again! I am Lauren Serpe, chair of AEA’s Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) topical interest group, and Deputy Technical Director of the global Learning, Evidence and Impact team at Pact.
Hi all! We are MEL specialists at Freedom House (Deanna Kolberg-Shah and Leah Squires) and Internews (Megan Guidrey) and have been collaborating to develop an evaluation framework for digital security support programs in the DRG space as part of the USAID-funded Human Rights Support Mechanism (HRSM). HRSM is a 7-year leader with associate award designed to implement cutting edge human rights programming globally. Led by Freedom House in partnership with the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative, Internews, Pact, and Search for Common Ground, HRSM facilitates cross-project learning through a learning agenda based in best practices identified across 37 different associate award projects.
Hi, we are David Connolly (Director of Learning, Evaluation, and Research [LER]), and Jill Baggerman (Program Officer, LER) at United States Institute of Peace (USIP), sharing fresh insights from rolling out USIP’s inaugural Learning Agenda. In USIP’s ongoing growth in evidence to practice, we outline the rationale behind the learning agenda, its cross-programmatic dialogue-based approach to generating evidence, and key lessons central to both peacebuilding and the democracy, rights and governance (DRG) fields.
Hi! My name is Marcia Mundt, and I oversee research, evaluation, and learning at the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS). I am joined by Linda Stern (NDI), Rakesh Sharma (IFES), and Natalie Trisilla (IRI).
My name is Laura Adams and I am a learning agenda fanatic (as well as the Co-Chair of the DRG TIG this year), so I’m happy to be introducing the DRG week blogs, all of which touch on learning agendas. “Learning agendas” have become ubiquitous across United States Government (USG) agencies over the last five years following the passage of the Evidence Act in 2018 and are now required as a type of systematic plan for identifying and addressing important questions to inform decision-making based on project evaluations. Our blog posts this week focuses on NGOs and also examines the slippery concept of “capacity building” in the DRG sector and will share some exciting updates from colleagues who have been part of the Made in Africa Evaluation project.
My name is Liane Ventura and I serve as a faculty Research Associate with the Center for Applied Research and Evaluation (CARE) in Women’s Health at East Tennessee State University (ETSU). I am an applied Public Health researcher who is interested in mixed methodology and community-engaged approaches.
I’m David Keyes and I run R for the Rest of Us. Over the years, I’ve helped hundreds of people learn R through courses and trainings. For a long time, I felt like I wasn’t a “real” R user. Real R users, in my mind, used R for hardcore stats. I “only” used R for descriptive stats. I sometimes felt like I was using a souped up sports car to drive 20 miles an hour to the grocery store. Eventually, I realized that this framing misses the point. R started out as a tool created by statisticians for other statisticians. But, over a quarter century since its creation, R is as much a tool to improve your workflow as it is a tool for statistics.
Hi, my name is Elena Pinzon O’Quinn, and I am the National Learning and Evaluation Director at LIFT, an economic mobility nonprofit. Back in December 2021, I shared my tips for building a culture of data for decision making in nonprofits, which covered simple and efficient ways to share data. But getting data into stakeholders’ hands is just one piece of the puzzle in continuous improvement and learning. With efficient client data management systems and real-time dashboards, program teams often have near-constant access to data. At LIFT, we have had a strong track record of using data in strategic and long-term planning but struggled with how to use data on a more regular basis to understand program performance and integrate timely data-informed program improvements.
