Two of EnCompass’ ground-breaking evaluations were featured at the 8th annual African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) International Conference. The conference was held March 27-31 in Kampala, Uganda, with the theme “Evaluation of the Sustainable Development Goals: Opportunities and Challenges for Africa.”
EnCompass Evaluation Specialist Kelsey Simmons presented abstracts from these evaluations at the AfrEA conference. The first details the MacArthur Foundation’s monitoring and evaluation strategy for their Maternal Health Accountability Portfolio, which includes seven civil society organizations working across Nigeria. The strategy included developing a separate external support contract to simultaneously build grantee organizations’ capacity to monitor, learn from, and adapt their projects over time while also evaluating the portfolio as a whole.
The second presentation discussed an organizational network analysis (ONA) of the community of organizations working to prevent stillbirths around the world. The presentation highlighted how results from the ONA were used in the 2016 Lancet Series on Ending Preventable Stillbirths and in subsequent stakeholder dissemination events to foster deeper discussion and action to reduce stillbirths.
“A lot of development programming comes from and evaluations originate in the ‘West,’ so having the opportunity to attend this conference and, most importantly, learn from African evaluators, is truly an honor,” Ms. Simmons said before her departure for AfrEA. “I look forward to sharing EnCompass’ innovative approaches to monitoring and evaluation, while also having the opportunity to engage with evaluators from many of the countries where we work.”