Africa evaluators demand national evaluation policies
Mar 28, 2017
The 8th African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) conference is being held at Speke Resort Munyonyo
Africa evaluators under the Africa Gender and Development Evaluators Network (AGDEN) have demanded for a speedy formulation of national evaluation policies for sustainable and equitable development.
Dr. Florence Etta the AGDEN vice chair said the policies would help in formation of evidence based national development policies.
"We are facing an overall challenge in how the global evaluation community can contribute to ensuring that evaluation will play a key role in shaping and contributing to sustainable gender-responsive and equitable development" she said.
Etta said that given the challenge, African governments are asked to put in place the policies to allow public sector agencies to conduct evaluations of all sector programmes on a regular basis.
The evaluators made the demands during 8th African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) conference, Kampala at Speke Resort Munyonyo on Monday.
The five day conference will run on the theme 'Evaluation of The Sustainable Development Goals; Opportunities and Challenges for Africa.' The conference aims at promoting exchange between researchers, academia, emerging evaluators and practitioners in support of the SDGs in Africa.
The evaluators argued that the policies once in place, would help in strengthening the technical capacity of national agencies to design, implement, analyse, disseminate and use evaluations.
"The policy would help strengthen the capacity of public sector agencies to identify their evaluation needs and understand how to define these needs to the agencies that select and design evaluations," Yenkai Huchu the UN women monitoring and evaluation assistant in Zimbabwe said.
Management System International (MSI) evaluation manager, Carolyne Njihia, said the policies help to integrate approaches on evaluation.
"As countries move towards broader development goals, such as poverty reduction and equitable development, the need for integrated cross-sectoral planning receives a higher priority," she explained.