The first video is from Jennifer Bisgard, AfrEA representative to the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE) board. She is also the co-chair of the United Nations EvalPartners Task Team on Toolkits to support Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluators (VOPE). An expert in monitoring and evaluation, Ms. Bisgard co-founded Khulisa Management Services in 1993.
In her video, Ms. Bisgard discusses the early days of M&E in South Africa and the introduction of the South Africa Monitoring Association (SAMEA). In her view, it is important to make a concerted effort to professionalize the evaluation profession. Networking will also remain a key tool in the next few years, namely with new initiatives focusing on evaluation issues for youth, gender and marginalized communities.
The second video is from Michael Quinn Patton, an independent organizational development and program evaluation consultant, and former President of the American Evaluation Association. He is a widely known and prolific contributor in the evaluation community and the author of many books, including "Utilization-Focused Evaluation” (2008) and "Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods" (2015). Mr. Patton spent 18 years on the faculty at the University of Minnesota. He is the recipient of numerous evaluation awards.
In his video, Dr. Quinn Patton discusses the globalization and diversification of the evaluation profession. He recalls conducting the meta-evaluation of the Paris Declaration for Aid Effectiveness and the overall lesson of how much ‘contexts’ matter in understanding the implementation of the Paris Declaration Principles. He asks, “How can we, as a global community, support the global response to the big issues that we are facing?”
You are welcome to add your voice to the campaign by writing to Jérôme Gandin at jgandin@universalia.com. If you are interested in joining the EvalPartners initiative to promote an enabling environment for evaluation in line with the Global Evaluation Agenda, please write to Asela Kalugampitiya at aselakalugampitiya@yahoo.ie.