Why Evaluate?
The word ‘evaluation’ can be used to cover many different but related activities such as reviewing, accountability reporting, measuring impact, cost analysis. We suggest that there are two main activities that partnerships should be considering as evaluation:
- Measuring whether or not an individual project or programme has met its goals or objectives and how efficiently the partnership was able to achieve these.
- Reviewing the overall partnership plan, which will include taking into account the results of the individual projects and programmes along with other data.
There are many reasons why evaluation is important including:
- Results of evaluations help partnerships decide how to deploy limited resources to have the maximum impact and can help decide when to stop projects.
- It facilitates the sharing of knowledge and skills between partner organisations and with other partnerships.
- Evaluated work has better outcomes than work that is not evaluated regardless of anything else a partnership may do.
- Evaluation can involve local people and publishing the results can build visible and constructive accountability.
