Relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact, and sustainability are widely used evaluation criteria, particularly in international development co-operation. They help to determine the merit or worth of various interventions, such as strategies, policies, programmes or projects. This guidance aims to help evaluators and others to better understand those criteria, and improve their use.
The guidance presented in this book provides step-by-step guidance on the core steps in planning, carrying out and learning from evaluation, as well as some basic principles on programme design and management.
'The Road to Results: Designing and Conducting Effective Development Evaluations' presents concepts and procedures for evaluation in a development context. It provides procedures and examples on how to set up a monitoring and evaluation system, how to conduct participatory evaluations and do social mapping, and how to construct a "rigorous" quasi-experimental design to answer an impact question. The text begins with the context of development evaluation and how it arrived where it is today. It then discusses current issues driving development evaluation, such as the Millennium Development Goals and the move from simple project evaluations to the broader understandings of complex evaluations. The topics of implementing 'Results-based Measurement and Evaluation' and constructing a 'Theory of Change' are emphasized throughout the text. Next, the authors take the reader down 'the road to results, ' presenting procedures for evaluating projects, programs, and policies by using a 'Design Matrix' to help map the process. This road includes: determining the overall approach, formulating questions, selecting designs, developing data collection instruments, choosing a sampling strategy, and planning data analysis for qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method evaluations. The book also includes discussions on conducting complex evaluations, how to manage evaluations, how to present results, and ethical behavior--including principles, standards, and guidelines. The final chapter discusses the future of development evaluation. This comprehensive text is an essential tool for those involved in development evaluation.
Almost any economist will agree that education plays a key role in determining a country’s economic growth and standard of living, but what we know about education policy in developing countries is remarkably incomplete and scattered over decades and across publications. Education Policy in Developing Countries rights this wrong, taking stock of twenty years of research to assess what we actually know—and what we still need to learn—about effective education policy in the places that need it the most. Surveying many aspects of education—from administrative structures to the availability of health care to parent and student incentives—the contributors synthesize an impressive diversity of data, paying special attention to the gross imbalances in educational achievement that still exist between developed and developing countries. They draw out clear implications for governmental policy at a variety of levels, conscious of economic realities such as budget constraints, and point to crucial areas where future research is needed. Offering a wealth of insights into one of the best investments a nation can make, Education Policy in Developing Countries is an essential contribution to this most urgent field.
Ireland is a strong voice for sustainable development. Quality partnerships with civil society, staunch support for multilateralism and good humanitarian donorship are hallmarks of its development co-operation.
This reference guide lays out standards for each phase of a typical evaluation process: from defining purpose, to planning, designing, implementing, reporting, and learning from and using evaluation results.
This book aims to present an alternative view of humanitarian action. It adds to current conversations and dilemmas within the humanitarian sphere by departing from traditional views that consider humanitarian interventions as a concrete human activity aimed at providing relief to disaster victims. Much differently, it invokes the idea that humanitarian action is also a cognitive process. In this process, both humanitarians and disaster survivors alike, unknowingly, apply historically, societally, and culturally defined symbolic constructions to make sense of post-disaster information and to make decisions. In the specific case of humanitarian workers, these symbolic constructions influence how they understand their post-disaster reality, including how they relate to those they consider to be in pain or distress. This way of looking at humanitarian action builds upon a robust theoretical framework called Institutional Logics, which helps us identify and interpret how individuals make sense of their reality. So it brings the complex world of the individual into a discussion that generally considers the organization as the unit of analysis. Studying humanitarian action through this alternative lens makes it easy to see that objective and verifiable post-disaster information is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to design humanitarian interventions, let alone assess their value and benefits. A Symbolic Approach to Humanitarian Action: It Takes One to Know One aims to bridge the gap between research and practice in humanitarian action by translating academic knowledge into an accessible format that can be used by practitioners to improve their work on the ground.
Each year, organizations spend millions of dollars trying out new innovations and improvements-and millions will be wasted if they can't quickly find out what's working and what is not. The Success Case Method offers a breakthrough evaluation technique that is easier, faster, and cheaper than competing approaches, and produces compelling evidence decision-makers can actually use. Because it seeks out the best stories of how real individuals have actually used innovations, The Success Case Method can ferret out success no matter how small or infrequent. It can salvage the few ''gems'' of success from a larger initiative that is not doing well or find out how to make a partially successful effort even more successful. The practical methods and tools in this book can help those who initiate and foster change, including leaders, executives, managers, consultants, training directors, and anyone else who is trying to make things work better in organizations get the greatest returns for their investments.
States of Fragility 2020 sets a policy agenda for fragility at a critical turning point: the final countdown on Agenda 2030 is at hand, and the pandemic has reversed hard-fought gains. This report examines fragility as a story in two parts: the global state of fragility that existed before COVID-19, and the dramatic impact the pandemic is having on that landscape.
