Vidhya Shanker here, from Rainbow Research. Previously, I explained intersectionality—despite cooptation by contemporary organizations vying for funding—as a centuries-old concept borne from subjugated knowledge and liberation struggles as valuable for situation analyses. Today, I examine intersectionality’s value in relation to certain dimensions of program theory.
Hi! I’m Jess Littman, MSc in M&E candidate at American University and Evaluation Associate at Educate!, a social enterprise which works to prepare youth in Africa with the skills to succeed in today’s economy. We’re running a series of internal evaluations of our new distance learning models. These were piloted in Uganda, initially in response to COVID-19 and school closures, and are now growing into a scalable, sustainable way for thousands of youth to participate in remote skills training. The main vector for both youth participation and data collection is the mobile phone, and a major design and evaluation challenge so far has been the gender gap in mobile phone access.
Hello! Our names are Alejandro Imbach and Mine Pabari. We are independent evaluation consultants, focused on participatory, learning and utilisation evaluation. Mine is a member of the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc).
We are Tanyel Taysi and Salome Tsereteli-Stephens from the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative. One of the programs our organization leads is Women and Girls Empowered (WAGE) with the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), Grameen Foundation, and Search for Common Ground (Search).
Hello! I’m Nicole Clark, a licensed social worker and independent evaluator for Nicole Clark Consulting. I specialize in working with organizations and agencies to design, implement, and evaluate programs and services specifically for women and young women of color.
I’m Taj Carson, founder and CEO of Inciter (formerly Carson Research Consulting). In the early days of conducting evaluations, I realized I was inadvertently gatekeeping a valuable asset by collecting and storing data in a way that only I could get to. Over time, I heard from many organizations that they wanted more – more access to their data, and more ?exibility to use their data to construct stories for a wider range of audiences. Although the standard, PDF format reports often take up the bulk of an evaluation budget, I don’t believe they provide the bulk of the value. For instance, clients may wish to explore evaluation data sets to inform programmatic decision-making, re?ect on progress, and share feedback with constituents long after the funder receives their report. Too often the resources spent on study design, data collection, analysis, and reporting did not usefully live on after the reporting stage.
Hello, AEA365 community. My name is Dorothy Lucks, an inaugural member of EVALSDGs, a credentialed evaluator, a Fellow of the Australian Evaluation Society and, more importantly, an individual committed to embedding the global-local sustainable development goals (SDGs) in every evaluation that I am involved with. This blog summarizes key ways that all evaluators can get involved in evaluations that can contribute to sustainable change.
Hello! I am Kavita Mittapalli, Ph.D. I own a K-16 research and evaluation firm, MN Associates, Inc. (MNA) just outside Washington DC metropolitan area. I founded MNA in 2004 as a graduate student at George Mason University. I have a Ph.D. in Research Design and Methodology in Education. We are a team of five evaluators and an administrative staff with a combined 65 years of experience conducting a wide variety of social science and STEM education research and evaluation projects across the country.
Hi, I’m Kim Norris, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Director for American Institutes for Research (AIR)’s International Development Division. Part of my role is to lead a MEL practice. As part of our initial strategy, our practice team determined to focus on localizing our work. For us this means we seek out ways to increase local partnering and leadership in and around MEL efforts – from business development to MEL direction and execution. This involves local team leadership, capacity strengthening and engagement on local terms.
Greetings! I’m Paula Richardson from Salanga, an organization dedicated to reimagining monitoring and evaluation practices for community ownership, gender equality, and transformative change. Through our work with 50+ communities worldwide, we have gained insights and identified key takeaways from implementing a Community-Led monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning approach (CoLMEAL).
