Category: Webinar 2
Rethinking Evaluation Criteria At The Policy Level: Implications Of Inequities And Sustainability For Training Policy Evaluators
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SPEAKER SUMMARY
Misbehaving Beneficiaries
- In India, a lot of money has been invested in building toilets, but roughly 40% of these newly constructed toilets are not being used because beneficiaries prefer to use outdoor facilities.
- Discussion around how to nudge beneficiaries into better behaviour, including idea of shaming people.
- But the context is not well understood
- Instead of seeing this as “misbehaving beneficiaries”, we might ask: What is it they are thinking about? Where do they come from? What exactly are they living through?
Mistrusting Beneficiaries
- There is no reason why beneficiaries should trust us – we are data collectors who come in from somewhere else. Especially in communities which are more vulnerable or marginalized, evaluators are often seen as being hand-in-glove with the government machinery.
- We need to think about ways to build rapport with the people whom we are trying to talk to and get information from. There may be different ways of doing this. But the idea that we are going into communities to simply extract data is not going to work.
Mistargeted Programs
- There has been a strong feeling that much of the vulnerabilities reside in rural areas; as such, many of the benefits and schemes have had more of a rural-focus than an urban-focus.
- But, when it came to the pandemic, it was the urban areas in India that suffered most. The benefit programs that were designed were in some sense mistargeted and missed out on what was happening during the pandemic in urban areas.
- Inequalities are not stable; they change and they are contextual. While there is a stable element to vulnerabilities, we also need to pay attention to the changing component of inequality.
Mistaken Strategies
- Many programs aim to incorporate people who are most vulnerable as program beneficiaries, but do not necessarily start from the perspective of the beneficiaries themselves.
- e.g., what are the changes that the program recipients would like to see in their own lives?
- Example of Eklavya Model Residential School and the use of the name Eklavya
- Different interpretation of the story of Eklavya:
- Some see it as a great story about reverence towards the educator and teacher; others see it as an example of the inequalities that educational institutions can perpetuate, especially in regards to vulnerable child
An Evaluator’s Journey And Response: Responding To Inequities, Vulnerabilities And Answering Sustainability During COVID 19
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Reflecting on COVID-19 in India – What evaluator competencies are most relevant?
- Empathy
- When we are talking to frontline workers, we need to be appreciative of the work that they are doing, give them time and space, building perspective, showing warmth when we are interviewing, listening.
- Disruptive in a disruptive world
- Using technology as an enabler (e.g., to reach out to communities, to find more convenient times to reach people, such as after office hours).
- Methodology and data multiplicity
- Multiple data points add value
- Relational
- Helps in having everyone on board – convincing that evaluation can add value even in times like these.
- Collaboration
- Helps in pooling resources in the context of a resource-constrained environment; helps in building multiple perspectives.
Who’s Priorities? Reflections from Ebola and Covid Contexts in DRC
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- Lessons learned from working in the Ebola context and the COVID context in the Democratic Republic of the Congo – Key considerations when we are evaluating programs to look at sustainability and equity.
- 7 pillars in an MSF outbreak response – the number one step: discussing and engaging with community (we need to make sure that the community is implicated and have all the necessary information before moving on to the next pillars of outbreak response).
- We need to ask: What are the priorities of the people and communities we are designing and setting up interventions for? And then ask: Do you want our help in responding to those priorities? In the case of the Ebola outbreak in the DRC, we learned that Ebola was not the main priority of the communities at the time. The priorities were building wells and having access to clean water. Similarly with COVID, there were different priorities in the community at the time.
- Example of community-driven Ebola isolation centres set up in people’s own communities. This made a huge different because people had ownership in these isolation centres – people actually went to the centres and the outbreaks stopped.
- We will never have sustainability if we don’t have pertinent programming. And pertinent programming only comes from responding to priorities. And we will never know the priorities if we don’t engage with the community.
Epidemic Illusions: On The Coloniality Of Global Public Health
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- Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health
- Catalogues how what we think of as value-neutral, objective science actually commits symbolic violence.
- The modern aid complex is built on the idea that descendants of settler colonialists are morally related to people in the global south as potential helpers and saviours. But when you see that we are really beneficiaries and supporters of a global institutional order that systematizes their oppression, then the intervention actually changes from a failed aid development model to one of a reparative justice model.
- Symbolic Violence or Epistemic Injustice
- The capacity to impose the means for comprehending and adapting to the social world by representing the economic and political world in disguised, taken-for-granted forms.
- Words do symbolic violence (e.g., outbreak, superspreader). We need to really interrogate the categories that we use as part of our impact evaluations to see what kinds of ideological work that they are doing.
- Reparative Justice
- Reparations for American descendants of persons enslaved in the US and their potential impact on COVID-19 transmission – shows how eradication of the wealth gap between black and white Americans could have decreased COVID-19 by 30-90%
Rethinking Evaluation Criteria: Implications Of Inequities And Sustainability For Training Evaluators
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SPEAKER SUMMARY
Rethinking evaluation criteria in light of issues of inequities and sustainability – additional criteria that are needed:
- Reach
- The share of members of the target group involved in an intervention is often very limited. In reality, we are often only reaching a tiny fraction. This means that the benefits of a project are also very limited.
- Potential for Local/National Replication
- To what extent can the model introduced by the intervention be replicated by national/local institutions? For example: projects provide expensive equipment to locals without sufficient attention to sustainability.