Bibliography

[ Up ] [ African Guidelines ] [ Evaluation Training ] [ Bibliography ] [ UNAIDS Manual ]

Introduction to the Bibliography

Kate Ababio Spring and Mahesh Patel

Note:  This is a work in progress, and we welcome additional contributions to this Annotated Bibliography of Evaluations in Africa.  Authors are welcome to review and send in their own work, as many have done.  Please use the same format as that used in the reviews already included. 

Introduction

Evaluation in Africa is making waves, developing capacity of evaluators to produce evaluations of high quality and creating enabling environments for governments to demand evaluations as a means of accountability.  At present, the majority of evaluations that have been produced in Africa are those requested by donors and international agencies.  A quick scan of the names of the authors in this chapter will reveal that the majority of the first authors are not African. Of the original 133 articles that were reviewed, for example, three-quarters had a first author with a western name, fifteen percent were clearly African, and it was not clear in twelve percent of the cases. African author participation was acknowledged as second or third author in twelve percent of the total. There is some room for confusion as many of the authors and reviewers are African, but with names of European or Asian origin.  While the authors are mostly non-African, the reviewers, however, are nearly all African, by conscious design of the authors of this chapter of the bibliography.

The development of evaluation in Africa started getting documented as recently as the mid-nineteen eighties. In March 1987, a Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) seminar brought together donors and beneficiaries of development programmes to discuss objectives, means and experiences in evaluation.  The outcome was an awareness of the need to strengthen evaluation capacities of developing countries. OECD published the summary of the discussions in 1988, in Evaluation in Developing Countries: A Step Towards Dialogue.

This initiative called for a series of seminars to be held at regional level (i.e. Africa, Asia, Latin America), to intensify dialogue, discuss problems unique to each region, and recommend concrete and specific actions with a view to strengthening the evaluation capacities of developing countries.  The first seminar on evaluation in Africa, which was presented jointly by the African Development Bank (ADB) and Development Assistance Committee (DAC), was held in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, 2-4 May 1990. Its objectives included the clarification of evaluation needs as perceived by African countries themselves and the exploration of ways and means of strengthening self-evaluation capacities.

A follow-up seminar was carried out in 1998 in Abidjan, and proposed, inter alia

The discussions of the 1998 seminar underlined important directions in African administration and aid agencies. First, there is a global trend toward more accountable, responsive and efficient government.  The evaluation paradigm is therefore shifting to be a responsibility of beneficiaries of funds and programmes. Second, the role of evaluation within individual development assistance agencies is gaining in clarity and effectiveness.  The process of evaluation is improving as more is known about evaluation.  Third, the outlook for development partnership across the development community is hopeful, given the need for mobilisation of resources.  The product of evaluation – improved pogrammes – will eventually be emulated in the public sector, as evaluators contribute to the formulation of public sector reforms and help in the development of more efficient and transparent public expenditure (budget management) systems.

The Abidjan seminars addressed demand for evaluation, as the participants were high-ranking government officials who would be able to directly influence evaluation policy and major donors interested in evaluation or accountability issues.

In East Africa, a different kind of initiative was taking root, involving evaluation practitioners and addressing the capacity of evaluators and the supply side of evaluation. A network of evaluation practitioners was created by UNICEF in Nairobi, Kenya in 1977. There are now additional networks of evaluation practitioners in Comoros, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zimbabwe, with more to be formed within the coming year. In almost every case, the first meeting was initiated by UNICEF, although many of these associations now have independent administration.

An inaugural pan African conference of evaluators was held in Nairobi in September 1999, with 300 participants from 26 African countries. The theme of this conference was Building Evaluation Capacity in Africa. The main aims were to

The conference provided an opportunity for evaluators to get to know each other, and to participate in exchange of knowledge through a series of lectures by Dr. Michael Quinn Patton, a world class evaluator, and through the presentation of over 80 papers on evaluation by participants.

The two approaches of sensitising policy makers (the Abidjan approach, based on the World Bank framework), and of equipping practitioners (the Nairobi/UNICEF approach) should be synergistic in creating a home-grown demand for evaluation.

The evaluations presented here were mostly selected and reviewed by the Kenya Evaluation Association. Other reviews were obtained through Xc-eval, the e-mail network of evaluators working primarily in developing countries.  Several reviews were obtained from institutional databases from organisations such as UNICEF, UNCHS, IDRC, AMREF and UNDP.  The criteria for selection offered to reviewers were that the evaluations chosen should be interesting, relevant to the social and economic development of Africa, and have been published in the last ten years.

The final selection of reviews presented here is grouped into eight major categories: health, nutrition, education, water and environmental sanitation, children’s issues, economic issues and capacity building. There is a short paragraph at the beginning of each section explaining the major concerns in that sector, followed by the reviews. It should be noted that the grouping of reviews are based on the main theme of the article, but several of the articles could fit into other categories.  Unless otherwise stated, the reviews have been written by the authors.