Pact to present at leading African evaluation conference in March

This year, five Pact staff members from four country offices and three projects will present at the African Evaluation Association conference in Kigali, Rwanda, from March 18-22. This year’s conference theme is “Technology and Innovation in Evaluation Practice in Africa: The Last Nail on the Coffin of Participatory Approaches.” The 11th annual AfrEA Conference aims to provide a platform for professionals, researchers, students, and policymakers worldwide to share insights, best practices, and innovations in the field of monitoring and evaluation. 

Pact’s expertise is well-represented across practice areas, including Outcome Mapping and peacebuilding, economic strengthening, social welfare systems strengthening and Outcome Harvesting, management information systems and data visualization. The conference provides attendees a unique opportunity to learn about the state of evaluation in Africa, engage with Pact colleagues across the continent and build their network with other evaluators. 

Pact’s 2024 presenters include: 

Eyuel Demisse, MERL Manager in Ethiopia, will present a session entitled, “Insights from Participatory Outcome Mapping Exercise” where he will argue that participatory approaches will not be superseded by technology. Eyuel will present on his experience implementing the participatory Outcome Mapping approach in the Mobilizing and Enhancing Local Actors for Peace project. He will share valuable insights including challenges and potential benefits from using this methodology in a peacebuilding project. 

 Thomas Mugala, Senior M&E Officer in Zambia, will present two sessions from the ACHIEVE project’s experience strengthening the capacity of the Ministry of Community Development and Social Services (MCDSS) to improve health and social services outcomes among vulnerable children and adolescents (VCA) and their families. In his first session, “Enhancing evidence generation, decision-making and documentation of health and social assistance impact for VCA,” Thomas lays out four strategies the project has used in effectively engaging the MCDSS to co-develop a management information system for VCA services. 

 In his second presentation, “Evaluating complex social systems: Using the Outcome Harvesting approach,” Thomas will present on the ACHIEVE project’s two experiences implementing outcome harvesting to evaluate the complex social welfare systems changes that have occurred within the MCDSS through the course of the project. Sharing these best practices and lessons learned to Africa’s evaluation communities will reinforce outcome harvesting as a powerful tool in assessing sustainability and driving evidence-based decision-making, especially in a system strengthening context. 

 Nemes Mallya, Senior Program Office for Economic Strengthening in Tanzania, will present on the ACHIEVE project’s experience using an innovative analysis technique to assess the household economic status of families enrolled in the orphans and vulnerable children program. Entitled, “Improving economic status of families caring for OVC in Tanzania: Use of a categorization methodology to tailor interventions and maximize results,” Nemes’ presentation will cover their analytic technique for measuring a household’s economic status and how the results are used to target economic strengthening interventions in the program. 

 Kyaw Thura Tun, Senior M&E Officer for the ACHIEVE project in Washington, DC, and Tumainieli Mbwambo, Senior M&E Officer in Tanzania, will co-facilitate a half-day workshop on the data visualization software Microsoft Power BI titled, “Making evaluation data interactive: A novice Power BI workshop”. Representing the ACHIEVE project, Kyaw and Tumainieli will introduce participants to the most widely used data visualization platform among international development organizations, teaching them to model data for dashboards, connect data to Power BI and create simple visuals and dashboards.