The Cloudburst Group is grateful for the opportunity to present at this year’s American Evaluation Association’s “Evaluation 24” Conference, October 21-26 in Portland, Oregon!
Kate Marple-Cantrell, Senior Evaluation Specialist and Global Development Practice Area Programs Lead, and Noelle Wyman Roth, MEM, Senior Evaluation Specialist, shared their global development research and evaluation expertise with fellow evaluators of all backgrounds and experiences.
Below are some key insights shared during Kate’s presentation on “Addressing Learning and Evaluation Challenges: New USAID Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (DRG) Bureau Performance Evaluation Guidance” with Daniel Sabat, USAID Senior Learning Advisor, and Mateusz Pucilowski, Vice President, Evaluation, Research, and Analytics for Social Impact:
• Many evaluations and assessments involve a team of researchers conducting a series of key informant interviews, group interviews, and focus group discussions at one point in time over a three- to four-week period. Yet such studies regularly produce several complaints from commissioners, evaluators, and implementers related to the accuracy and reliability of the findings and the subsequent usefulness of the study.
• The Addressing Learning and Evaluation Challenges (ALEC) initiative of USAID’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance examined seven common challenges in performance evaluations and offered guidance to address them.
• The guidance developed under the ALEC initiative offers practical, common-sense recommendations to standardize the rigor of performance evaluations. This information can be used by commissioners of evaluations, evaluation firms and teams, and implementers conducting internal evaluations to plan and conduct performance evaluations that result in reliable and useful findings.
