aes18 International Evaluation Conference

Sharon Babyack (Indigenous Community Volunteers), Alison Rogers (PhD Candidate, University of Melbourne), Doyen Radcliffe (Indigenous Community Volunteers)
There is an urgent need to move towards culturally safe, appropriate and relevant ways of evaluating that contribute to better outcomes for Indigenous peoples. An Indigenous non-profit community development organisation has transformed towards this goal by intentionally building evaluation capacity over a period of four years. The organisation now incorporates participatory monitoring and evaluation approaches into community development practices to improve measurement and capture the outcomes with the communities.
The transformation adopted essential principles including inclusion, flexibility, empowerment, ownership and effective communication. These principles were incorporated to ensure that everyone involved were brought along on the journey to strengthen the monitoring, evaluation and learning systems.
An independent researcher was engaged to assess the degree to which the organisation was able to build evaluation capacity. This organisation’s journey of change and the methodology used to make the assessment may be useful for other organisations who could undertake a self-assessment or for other researchers who could adapt the process. Acknowledging that there are no common measures for assessing the sustainability of evaluation capacity building, this presentation will contribute to knowledge on this topic by sharing an example that has been implemented in practice.