AfrEA Conference 2024 – Reflections Day 5 – 22 March 2024

On Friday, 22 March 2024, the day started as usual with a plenary session that was the third Presidential Panel was under the theme: “Reforming VOPEs to become important actors in the National Evaluation Ecosystem.”

The Key Speakers included: AfrEA President, Rosetti Nabbumba Nayenga; President of the American Evaluation Association (AEA), Dr. Felicia R. Bohanon; The Secretary of ?the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE), Tsigereda Bekele, representing the President of IOCE; and the CEO of the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), Prof. Dugan Fraser. The Session Chair was Dr. Shylock Muyengwa, the Southern Africa Regional Representative at the AfrEA Board and the President of the Zimbabwe Evaluation Association (ZEA). The presenters discussed some of the challenges facing VOPEs in their attempts to institutionalise the evaluation profession in their respective countries and shared best practices, especially drawing from the IOCE VOPE Toolkit.

The last session that I took part in was the AfrEA – AEA Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) Thematic Interest Group (TIG) Panel under the theme: The Sister-Sister Partnership on DRG – Co-Sharing, Co-Development and Co-Learning: Insights from the AEA DRG – AfrEA Sister Organization Collaborations on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG) Participatory Approaches. This was a plenary session that brought together Speakers that included: the AfrEA President, Rosetti Nabbumba Nayenga, AfrEA Board Members: Dr. Awuor Ponge and Eddah Kanini Karijo. It also had Speakers from the American Evaluation Society represented by Jerim Otieno Obure and Prof. Denise Baer (whose presentation was done by Jerim Otieno Obure). We had the privilege of this session being chaired by the President of the American Evaluation Association (AEA), Dr. Felicia R. Bohanon, to cement the working relationship between our two organisations catalysed by the work on the Thematic Interest Group on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance (DRG).

I made a presentation of Survey Findings for the AfrEA DRG Thematic Interest Group. This was a survey that had been carried out through survey Monkey to gauge the interest of the AfrEA membership on the formation of a TIG on DRG. ?As a way forward for the AfrEA DRG initiative, the team promised to contact all those who have confirmed an interest in joining the Thematic Interest Group on DRG, establish governance structure of the TIG within the AfrEA overall structure, start mobilising membership for involvement in TIG activities as well as partnerships with AEA for Consultancies on DRG and bring out the diverse skills sets demonstrated by the participants to the survey.

The different Panelists emphasised on the importance of collaboration, knowledge sharing, and co-learning between the American Evaluation Association (AEA) and the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) in the context of DRG participatory approaches. They also highlighted the successes so far in the young relationship and some of the challenges of the sister-sister partnership between AEA and AfrEA. The main focus of the session was on participatory approaches, which aim to promote democratic governance, human rights, and social justice in Africa.

After this final plenary session, Dr. Ravi Madhira Ram of the Africa Gender and Development Evaluators Network (AGDEN) awed the participants with a well-presented Gender Audit of the abstracts that were presented at the conference. The verdict was there is still some work to do going forward in terms of coming up with a gender-aware conference and paper presentations. ?The key recommendations for AfrEA from this audit was that there is need to emphasise gender, rights, equity and social inclusion for the next AfrEA conference preparations and the scoring for future AfrEA abstract selections; and that the AfrEA board should walk the talk and act on its already defined steps on gender, rights, equity and inclusion. After the recommendations by AGDEN resulting from the Gender Audit, it was now time to reconvene for the closing ceremony. The 11th AfrEA Conference was officially closed by the outgoing President Madam Rosetti Nabbumba Nayenga, after symbolically handing over to her successor, Dr. Miché Ouedraogo, who unveiled his new Board.

During the closing ceremony, the Chief Guest, representing the Rwanda Minister for Finance, was Mr. Alex Kashaija Mugabo, who also serves as the Vice-President of the Rwanda Monitoring and Evaluation Organization (RMEO). He narrated the origins of the RMEO, which he traced back to IPDET 2015 at Carleton University, where he met with me there, how I introduced him to VOPE operations and how he finally brought this idea home and how UNICEF Rwanda, consulted me and ?helped play a great role in the establishment of the RMEO.

My main takeaway on Day 5 of the Conference was that it is important to reform the Voluntary Organizations of Professional Evaluators (VOPEs) to become important actors in the national evaluation ecosystems. Doing this would involve enhancing their capacity, credibility, and influence to contribute effectively to policy-making, program development, and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) processes. There is need for VOPEs to foster a strong evaluation culture, promoting evidence-based decision-making, and building partnerships between VOPEs, government agencies, and other stakeholders to ensure more effective and efficient evaluation practices. Reforming VOPEs and integrating them into the national evaluation ecosystem, essentially means improving the quality and relevance of evaluations, will promote transparency and accountability, and ultimately will contribute to better development outcomes.

My other takeaway message is the importance of building strong partnerships and collaborations; need to foster mutual respect and understanding coupled with accountability; and promoting capacity building; knowledge sharing and consultancy opportunities between the evaluation professionals in the Global North and those in the Global South on issues of democracy, human rights and good governance.

This was an experience never to forget.

Thank you, Africa… Thank you AfrEA… We will keep the promise…