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.