No One Can Know Everything: Collaborating for Better Evaluation Recommendations
Organizational Challenge: In June 2016, USAID/Jordan decided that, while its systems were producing strong evaluations, there must be a way to further enhance the utility of the final recommendations for learning and subsequent adaptive management. The Program Office elected to use a CLA lens to review the then-current evaluation processes to see how they could be improved.
CLA Approach:
- Internal Collaboration: The mission identified a need for enhancing collaboration between evaluation team members and USAID activity managers to ensure that evaluation recommendations were developed and worded in ways that would increase the likelihood of their utilization for improving programs.
- Pause & Reflect: A new workshop was added to the evaluation process in which evaluation stakeholders would collaboratively co-generate the final recommendations after the evaluators had finalized their key findings and conclusions.
Outcomes: As a result of all stakeholders’ openness to continuous learning and improvement, these workshops, attended by USAID technical managers of the activity being evaluated, the evaluation team members, Program Office staff, and staff from the mission’s Monitoring and Evaluation Support Project, have resulted in perceived improvements to the utility of the final recommendations without undermining the integrity of the evaluation process.
This blog post is part of a series featuring the 10 winners of the 2017 Collaborating, Learning and Adapting Case Competition. A new case will be posted on USAID Learning Lab each Thursday: October 12 - December 14.