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While many knowledge workers may fear that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will threaten their jobs, this article argues that small evaluation businesses should embrace AI tools to increase their value in the marketplace and remain relevant. In this article, consultants from a research, evaluation, and strategy firm, Intention 2 Impact, Inc., make a case for using AI tools to disrupt business as usual in evaluation from theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, AI may...

Audience This guidance is primarily aimed at development and humanitarian professionals who design or manage monitoring and evaluation processes to support design and implementation of qualitative monitoring using Most Significant Change (MSC), Outcome Harvesting (OH), or Outcome Mapping (OM), which are participatory, outcome-focused qualitative methods. Purpose This guidance is a resource to strengthen qualitative monitoring, specifically addressing commonplace gaps or weakness in the...

How can we transform monitoring and evaluation (M&E) into a more adaptive, emergent process to address uncertainty and complexity in todays’ world? How do we move from compliance and accountability to learning – to support better, more timely, decisions? Join GEI Program Manager, Dugan Fraser, as he discusses these questions and others with Special Guest, Søren Haldrup, from UNDP's Strategic Innovation Unit where he manages UNDP's innovation facility and leads a new initiative called the M&E Sandbox.

This study mainly aimed to look at adaptive management in the program cycle (throughout Program Cycle processes, including strategy, project, and activity design and implementation) and to look at the Enabling Conditions: how an organization’s culture, business processes, and resource allocation support adaptive management. It explores elements of adaptive management that correspond to the objectives of the study as follows: 1) Assess grantees’ level of understanding of adaptive management...

This guidance seeks to ensure that UK Aid Direct applicants and grant holders understand what the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) means by beneficiary feedback mechanisms, and more specifically, that they: • Understand the terms used that relate to beneficiary feedback mechanisms in UK Aid Direct guidance and templates • Understand beneficiary feedback mechanisms and why they are a useful tool for project monitoring and learning • Learn how to use beneficiary feedback...

This CDI Practice Paper by Tom Aston and Marina Apgar makes the case for ‘bricolage’ in complexity-aware and qualitative evaluation methods. It provides a framework based on a review of 33 methods to support evaluators to be more intentional about bricolage and to combine the component parts of relevant methods more effectively. It discusses two cases from practice to illustrate the value added of taking a more intentional approach. It further argues that navigating different forms of...

The CLARISSA Nepal team collected and analysed 400 life stories of children and young people engaged in or affected by the worst forms of child labour (WFCL), particularly in the “Adult Entertainment” sector in Nepal, which includes children working in Dohoris (restaurants playing folk music), dance bars, spa-massage parlours, khaja ghars (tea/snack shop) and guest houses. Stories were also collected from children in CLARISSA’s focus neighbourhoods, children in this category...

Process tracing is a causal methodology that can help people understand how a particular large-scale change actually happened within a complex dynamic environment. Much of the existing literature provides important information about the method; we wrote this brief to help more people operationalize the concepts and learn about practical steps for using this method more easily, with quality, and toward a more equitable world. This piece was written based on our experiences implementing...

How a new approach to monitoring and evaluation can make sense of complex projects Building the foundation for results, sense-making and learning ‘Demonstrating real world impact can be an elusive holy grail for most NGO …

Collective leadership feels timely and important in an uncertain, fast changing, and challenging world. This report comes at this heightened moment of urgency and appetite for renewal, bringing potential to do things differently in public services and communities. The opportunities and challenges of true collaboration-in-practice, in the absence of blueprints, mean that it has never been more necessary to change ways of working and foreground learning. As outcomes remain important, and...

This Research and Evidence Paper presents the theory-based and participatory evaluation design of the Child Labour: Action-Research- Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) programme. The evaluation is embedded in emergent Participatory Action Research with children and other stakeholders to address the drivers of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL). The report describes the use of contribution analysis as an overarching approach, with its emphasis on crafting, nesting and...

In her acclaimed study of effective cross-organizational teamwork, Harvard Business School Professor Amy C. Edmonson concluded that “trying things that...

Calls for more ‘adaptive programming’ have been prominent in international development practice for over a decade. Learning-by-doing is a crucial element of this, but programmes have often found it challenging to become more learning oriented. Establishing some form of reflective practice, against countervailing incentives, is difficult. Incorporating data collection processes that generate useful, timely and practical information to inform these reflections is even more so.This paper...

Sensemaking and Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) are similar approaches, based on collecting stories about a real life experience from a large number of stakeholders on a topic of interest to the evaluation, and giving the storytellers themselves the responsibility for analyzing and making sense of the stories. Because a large number of stories are collected and self-interpreted, it is possible to conduct quantitative analysis of recurrent themes, perspectives and feelings emerging in...

Steff had the pleasure to co-author the first SenseMaker Practitioner Guide with a group of friends and colleagues supported and published by Oxfam and CRS. This practical guide is for those who wish to use SenseMaker to conduct assessments, monitor progress, and undertake evaluations or research. Drawing on more than a decade of experience, the authors share dozens of examples from international development, providing practical tips and ideas for context-specific adaptations. They show how...

Achieving broad-based socio-economic development requires interventions that bridge disciplines, strategies, and stakeholders. Effective sustained progress requires more than simply an accumulation of sector projects, and poverty reduction, individual wellbeing, community development, and societal advancement do not fall neatly into sectoral categories. However, researchers and practitioners recognize key operational challenges to achieving effective integration that stem from the structures...