Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
I am Shaha Zehra, Operations Analyst, writing from the World Bank’s Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI). In June 2019, our partner, the CLEAR Initiative launched gLOCAL Evaluation Week, an M&E knowledge sharing initiative with an aim to foster local, regional, and global knowledge sharing and networking opportunities, and we would like you to join us for gLOCAL 2022 by hosting a session or participating.
Hosting a gLOCAL event can help the organizers reach their strategic goals. After years of implementing gLOCAL, we know that a successful gLOCAL event can result in increasing the organizer’s visibility, making new connections, sharing important knowledge, or even reaching agreements with international organizations for evaluation projects. Valerie Gordon, President of Caribbean Evaluators, mentioned that her gLOCAL 2021 event boosted her VOPE’s visibility in the Caribbean and soared affiliation requests.
gLOCAL Evaluation Week has grown to become one of the largest evaluation events in the world. The inaugural gLOCAL Evaluation Week in 2019 took place in 38 countries, with support from 177 event organizers and an estimated 22,000 participants. In 2020, gLOCAL occurred virtually and included more than 250 events hosted by 188 institutions in 40 countries. Last year, gLOCAL 2021 took place in 63 countries with 346 events and over 20,000 participants.
gLOCAL is a diverse and participatory space for M&E knowledge and experience sharing. At the heart of gLOCAL lies the conviction that evaluation is not only relevant to governments, but also to a wide variety of actors across the public spectrum that use evidence in their work. This is noticeable in the diversity of event organizers’ and participants’ backgrounds as well as in its events thematic richness.
During gLOCAL 2021 event organizers came from academic, government, non-governmental, and private backgrounds. It is worth mentioning that non-governmental organizations hosted over 40% of the events (see Figure A). gLOCAL event participants come from a vast array of backgrounds that enrich the dialogue about evaluation and help to spread the word in different fields (see Figure B).
Organizers are encouraged to host events in their own language and over the past few years, we have seen events in Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Mandarin – and many more. Every year, gLOCAL events fall under traditional M&E themes, namely Evaluation Communication and Use, Evaluation Methods, and Evaluation Capacity Development, or the special theme for the year. In 2021 most popular thematic tracks were Evaluation Capacity Development and the special theme, “Building Forward Better.” To encourage year-round learning, gLOCAL organizers are encouraged to share event summaries, which can be accessed on our website.
Last year’s overarching theme, “Build Forward Better,” signaled the importance of evaluation in our collective recovery from the many challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. As we keep looking forward, this year the theme is “EvolveEval: The evolution of M&E in the 21st century.” The pandemic and the adaptation to remote work conditions it imposed generated innovations in data gathering and processing methods that are worth sharing among the global evaluation community.
Be part of gLOCAL 2022!
In 2022 we aim at having the largest and most diverse gLOCAL Evaluation Week. You can be part of this movement by:
- Registering an event proposal before April 6th on our website.
- Enrolling to the events of your interest. You can check our agenda on this link throughout the month of May.
- Encouraging others in your network to organize or attend gLOCAL events.
- Sharing information about gLOCAL on social media channels.
gLOCAL is organized by the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI) and the Centers for Learning on Evaluation and Results (CLEAR).
Stay tuned to the GEI’s website and social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter) for news and information about gLOCAL. I invite you to join gLOCAL and be part of one of the largest global M&E knowledge sharing event!
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