Welcome
to the
African Evaluation Association
web site !
This is DRAFT 1.0: Please do not copy or quote!
Background
The Inaugural
Conference of the African Evaluation Association was held in Nairobi on the
13-17 September 1999 and attended by over 300 evaluators from 35 countries.
About 80 papers were presented covering all major areas of evaluation
research. Ten national associations or networks of evaluators in Africa were
established through this initiative. The African Evaluation Association
(AfrEA) was created as
an informal network facilitated by UNICEF Eastern and Southern Africa Regional
Office (ESARO) as follow-up to the Conference and to facilitate implementation
of its recommendations..
The AfrEA Database
The AfrEA
database
with detailed skill profiles of over 450 evaluators working in Africa, created
as part of this initiative, can be obtained in searchable form or as a MS Word
document. All evaluators working in
Africa are invited to send in registration forms so as to be included in this
database.
AfrEA Conference Objectives
The AfrEA conference had the overall objective of "Increasing
Evaluation Capacity in Africa" as well as 6 specific goals:
1) to foster the
creation of networks of professional evaluators and professional
associations;
2) to develop a
sustainable structure to link national associations to an Africa-wide
association;
3) to review the
US programme evaluation standards for adoption or adaptation in Africa;
4) to create a
database of evaluators in Africa;
5) to invite
contributions to an annotated bibliography of evaluations in Africa;
6) to publish
the papers and proceedings of the Conference.
AfrEA Conference Documents and Resources
During the Conference, Michael Quinn-Patton, author of
"Utilization Focused Evaluation" delivered a series of excellent
training lectures. The response to these was
very positive. The lectures had been taped so we asked him for permission to make
a transcription freely available in Africa. He kindly agreed. This
short training text “Utilization
Focused Evaluation
in Africa” is probably the most useful training document on evaluation freely available in Africa.
Participants discussed a paper titled "Appropriateness
of the Program Evaluation Standards for use in Africa". It was
decided to create indigenous "African Evaluation Guidelines"
through collaboration between national associations and networks. The
current draft is available on this site (in "Key Documents") and a final version will be
published
early in 2001.
Many evaluators in Africa have sent in
reviews of key evaluation documents. Over 100 reviews are available in our
"Annotated Bibliography". These
have been structured by topic. Authors and evaluators are welcome to send
in more.
An additional available resource is a
final draft set of "M&E
Guidelines" for national
HIV/AIDS control programmes produced by UNAIDS.
Other
resources and links to interesting sites will be added from time to time.
AfrEA
Site Web Master
Acknowledgements:
The AfrEA Conference was sponsored by UNICEF,
IDRC, CARE, FHI, ADB, UNDP, and UNCHS.
Special thanks are due to the Regional Director of
UNICEF, Urban Jonsson, for his support to this initiative.
This page was last updated on 02/20/01.