AfrEA Conference 2024 – Reflections Day 2 – 19 March 2024

On Tuesday, 19 March 2024, the second day of the Conference, a Young and Emerging Evaluator, Mr Nicolas Uwitonze , a Doctoral Candidate at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech , in the Department of Agriculture, Leadership and Community Education, under the Supervision of Prof. Thomas Archibald , delivered a full day workshop titled: Evalpreneurship in Africa: Navigating the Landscape of Evaluation Entrepreneurship and Equity in the Digital Age.

Mr. Kyaw Thura Tun from PACT International also delivered a heavily attended half-day workshop on: “Making Evaluation Data Interactive: A Novice Power BI Workshop.” ?Other Workshop presenters on Day 2 included: Dr. Dorothea Deus; Monsieur Kouadio Adiko Honore Menzan; Sigue Assita; AGDEN Vice-President, Ousséni Kinda ; Jean de DIEU HOUNTONDJI ; Amos MENARD and Henry Chungu .

To crown the second day was the full day workshop titled: “Conducting climate/ecosystem and equity-responsive evaluations,” under the Climate Change Strand. This was facilitated by a Joint South African Monitoring Evaluation Association SAMEA South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA) and Deutsches Evaluierungsinstitut der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit (gGmbH) – the DEval - German Institute for Development Evaluation (DEval) Team comprising: Sinenhlanhla Tsekiso (SAMEA), Cara Hartley (SAMEA), Dirk Hoffman (DEval) and Kevin Moull (DEval).

My take home from the Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD) Workshops is that there is yearning to advance knowledge especially in emerging technologies, both for the established practitioners as well as the Young and Emerging Evaluators (YEEs). This was evident in the way the Workshop rooms were packed and also the composition of the participants. There were equally great interactive discussions in the Workshops, with participants always asking for more time. This is a learning point and will be taken into consideration in the organisation of the next Conference.