Development Communication, Advocacy and Education: Tips and Tools for Improving Evaluation

1. Development Communication, Advocacy and Education: Tips and Tools for Improving Evaluation Introduction Henri-Bernard Solignac Lecomte Informal Expert Workshop Bonn19 March 2007

2. Why are we here? • 2005 annual meeting of Network DAC Development Communicators: 2 priorities • Communicating about aid effectiveness • Evaluation • Context • Mostly polls • Evaluation still recent • Weak demand within Ministries • Yet, new aid paradigm, more pressure to evaluate

3. The Aid Effectiveness Paradigm Managing for Results 4 Ownership (Partner countries) Partners set the agenda 1 Alignment (Donors - Partner) Using partners’ systems Aligning with partners’ agenda 2 Establishing common arrangements Sharing information Harmonisation (Donors - Partner) Simplifying procedures 3 Development Results

4. Evaluation today(survey of DAC members) • 95% evaluate own activities either as ‘continuous self-evaluation’ or ‘once-off external evaluations’, while 16/19 DAC donors require partner organisations to evaluate certain activities. • Function of investment, accountability: ad hoc approach rather than culture of learning? • A variety of methodologies: • 8/10 / Communications Theory and Methodologies for evaluation • 5/10 / DAC Evaluation Guidelines • 4/10 / Project Cycle • 3/10 donors / Educational Methodologies

5. Tools & Indicators used for monitoring performance and evaluation Source: Questionnaire administered to DAC Heads of Information 2005/06

6. Donors: top challenges in evaluating their own Public Awareness/Development Education activities • Measuring impact: how to • Attribution: causal link between observed change and specific activity • Resources available • Indicators: process indicators, outcome indicators, short-term, long-term and indicators comparable between different activities … • Culture of evaluation: how to change behaviour? • Awareness-raising not treated as seriously as ‘development cooperation programmes’ by agencies/ministries; so less managerial demand for results

7. Donors: Top challengesin evaluating Public Awareness and Development Education through CSOs • As above: resources available, how to measure impact, lack of culture of evaluation and comparable indicators … • Plus NGO-specific challenges • lack of interest in evaluating long-term reach, especially when funded for short-term activities • diversity of NGO activities and targets • difficulty in having standard indicators • no established methodologies • few trainers • no expertise in evaluation • ‘trust’ to report negative conclusions from evaluation

8. Today • How to evaluate? Evaluating what? How not to do it? Concrete steps and tools in evaluation Break out Plenary Tomorrow • Getting Evaluation right A closer look at good examples Specific challenges: values, involving recipients, … Break out Plenary: Qs & As with expert panel Conclusions • And then?

9. House Rules • Informal • Frank • Language

10. Thank you! www.oecd.org/dev/opinion