Evaluators have effects on the projects they evaluate, as I discussed in a recent post. We can also affect each other, within our evaluation teams. But can we do so without reinforcing top-down, neocolonialist aid patterns? Can we genuinely learn from each other, when the systems we work within establish a clear hierarchy?
I learned so much from this blog by Rai Sengupta on BetterEvaluation.org, from December 2025. It has influenced a lot of my thinking in this piece. It’s the first item listed in the Bibliography below.
I’ve been struggling to put aside my old mental model of mutual learning to write this post. Well, it’s not mutual learning, is it, what we have always done? It’s “Capacity Building.” A team lead, educated in the wealthy west, does some team training as part of the evaluation. It’s top-down, with content, timing and form all at the discretion of the funders or the team lead.
That model needs ejecting. A few funders may be open to that, while others patently will not. Whatever the posture of a given funder for a given evaluation, by working together, with open ears and hearts, I think we can bring something to life that works differently, that has different goals. We can actively choose different goals and modes of operating and of learning. We can imbue evaluation processes with multi-directional dialogue. The benefits and learning will spread more equally across the people and groups who thus co-create something new.
[A note on jargon. Co-create is a jargon-y word that has always seemed a little 🙄. Before people started using that word, we worked together to write evaluation questions or “workshop” recommendations. Suddenly, this “working together” is now called co-creating. I’m wary and weary of rotating jargon in the evaluation world. It often feels like marketing instead of plain speech. But co-creation, in the best cases, is really shared decision-making and priority-setting. With good will and humility it can be a big shift in the voices and the agency of participants. Co-creating seems right when we’re talking about mutual learning.]
Humility and respect will go a long way towards improving our mutual learning. We have to recognize that we can’t and don’t know enough about the project, its sector, and its environment to do justice to the evaluation ourselves. It is simply not possible to evaluate well – usefully, robustly, in context – without strong local researchers and evaluators. These evaluations will not work without specialists who understand the policies and politics that act on the sector. Only the most specialized international evaluators – in sector AND geography – will meet such a standard. So let’s be real a minute, and talk about how this might look.
Inception Phase
Start with local team member presentations or discussions about the sector and project environment. They should have sufficient time both to prepare and to lead these discussions. If it’s last minute or they get only twenty minutes it’s clear it’s not serious. Evaluations will deeply benefit from taking this time in inception. For example, in an evaluation of a health project in areas affected by conflict, international evaluators won’t know how the project has interacted with government and private health providers, conflict dynamics across project geographies, security force interactions with the health system, or the labor pool – nurses or health attendants, for example – available to the project. Specialist local team members will be able to bring the rest of the team up to speed.
Leaders from the evaluand may also want to present on these issues, to explain how and why the project has developed the way it has. This builds on my last post about evaluator effects on the project team. Similarly, M&E staff from the project often see evaluations as an opportunity for professional growth. They should also have space to present project data and any issues around the data. They will know the how and why of targets and actuals, data collection challenges, quality assurance, and in-context interpretations and analyses. A working meeting between you as M&E professionals, perhaps without project leaders present, will open project M&E staff to be more candid about challenges they’ve faced. If the evaluation team shares their own concerns and challenges it will open the door to that kind of frankness.
Both the evaluand and the local evaluation team should have time with the evaluation questions before they are finalized. Not all donors respect this step, but many do have an “inception phase” with space to discuss and specify or modify the EQs. Inputs from evaluands and the evaluation team are essential for the EQs and the evaluation matrix. Methods that sound appropriate in a donor meeting room can be unrealistic, ineffective, insufficient, or poorly operationalized on the ground. An inclusive process tends to lead to buy-in of the results.
More things you can do during inception:
- Investigate local, national, regional evaluations based in the places you intend to work – there’s a tiny bibliography at the end of this article but many, many more resources online. It falls to you to do this work – not to locals to educate you.
- Build diverse field teams: feminist thinkers, ethnic group representatives, disabled researchers, academic writers, civil society activists. Yes, avoid conflicts of interest with the evaluand, but that doesn’t mean team members can’t care about the potential project outcomes. And consult organizations representing the rights of the evaluand’s participants, like women’s groups, LGBTQIA+, ethnic minorities, or others.
- Titles matter. Gender specialist, sector specialist, methodologist, field supervisor, translator… Field team members’ career progression should benefit from participation, including relevant titles for their roles. Don’t hide those names and titles behind a company name when it comes to report and dataset authorship.
- Stretch the calendar to include a solid period of initial team planning, preferably in retreat-like conditions. Give your team members time, space and encouragement to bring their perspectives to the table. This needs to happen before finalizing evaluation questions. Local evaluators should be able to weigh in and affect everything that cascades out from the EQs (i.e., methods, sample, instrumentation and protocols, analysis…)
- Sell more mutual designs to the donors. You know how they speak – bring the language and justification, and your team members’ own rationale, to the funders’ doorsteps. Get some “mutual learning breathing room” in your timeline and budget.Maybe your donors wanted focus groups, but your team feels community discussions sessions will be more fruitful and engaging.You and the team should be able to tell donor representatives why this is better. The learning doesn’t stop with you. Investigate participatory approaches that will put decision-making power in the hands of the evaluand and participants, instead of always in the hands of the donor-funded international evaluators.
Create space for all team members to put their competencies on the table. Some team members may know trauma-informed interviewing, for example, and can support others who haven’t had that experience. Others may be able to guide the team in how to dress, culturally accepted greetings, and realistic estimates of interviews or focus groups per day. Brainstorm interview and survey content, question order, wording, when and how to vary from scripts, and how to broach sensitive topics, together. The inception phase should include these types of learning.
International evaluators should be open with insider knowledge of funders. We often know funders’ priorities, buzzwords and methods-of-the-month. Or we have good relationships with program leads. These are all great inputs for local evaluation teams so they can write winning evaluation proposals themselves. This includes sharing examples of using such methods elsewhere, in support of local teams’ professional development. International evaluators often have access to literature and networks about given methods, sectors or geographies, that they can profitably share.
In the field
International evaluators should also share feedback for local team members on how funders see and score ways of doing fieldwork, managing data, quant and qual analysis, and reporting. I was nominally team lead for a brilliant COVID-era evaluation, but national sectoral experts actually led. There was a role for me – in making the evaluation processes and report acceptable to the funder. I learned a lot in that experience, about where my value-add really sat.
The following suggestions won’t work in every evaluation but every evaluation can benefit from learning like this:
- Continue involving project M&E staff, such as with collecting, processing and analyzing secondary data related to the affected populations. Ask their advice on outreach, field challenges, interpretations. Use formal sessions, not just informal communications, to seek this counsel.
- Invite experienced teammates to scaffold more junior team members. This might mean inviting the logistics team members to participate in interviews, maybe asking a subset of questions. Or, a senior teammate might support some difficult skills like focus group facilitation. Progress as you would if you had time and budget for it: talk among the team about what “good” facilitation looks like in the evaluation you’re undertaking, use role-playing in team training, then modeling, then mentoring, and one-on-one debriefing afterwards.
- Use team members across the evaluation. If it’s a multi-country evaluation, use local sectoral expertise across regions to build CV substance. Those who lead qualitative data collection like focus groups or in-depth interviews should have LOE for in-depth analysis participation. Local sector specialists should be leading high-level stakeholder interviews. Include gender specialists in sector-specialist instrument review, and train sector specialists in gender-inclusive design and fieldwork. Team members should all have a hand in presenting to donors and stakeholders and in designing dissemination. But NONE of this should be unfunded – if you wouldn’t do it for free, don’t expect national evaluators and specialists to do so.
When leadership means conceding
Donors rarely relinquish control of power levers in programming or M&E, at least not without a fight. They didn’t give up the reins even while emitting white papers about the promise and advent of participatory evaluation. They further failed to give up the reins after setting even modest targets for localization, which they did not meet. Donors are good at talking about challenging new ideas. But they move based on very old, very slow, very self-perpetuating hydraulics.
Actually, that’s true of most of us. We have to see differently, see ourselves differently, to change how we do our job. Otherwise, we’ll just do what we’ve always done. As an international evaluator, what do you know about the evaluation ways of thinking, priorities, and practices that are regularly in use in the country you plan to work in? If your answer is “not much,” could you work for a team lead who is an in-country evaluator? Have you ever seen that model in action?
It’s not common: bilateral and multilateral donors do not often hire team leads locally. Sure, it’s worth considering whether local experts are independent and impartial. Sometimes, an under-resourced sector may not have a lot of specialized evaluators. Or, sector specialists may be few enough that finding someone with an arm’s-length distance hasn’t been easy. But the potential for such problems somewhere should not rule out national evaluation leadership everywhere. We have to relinquish our previously very high levels of control: of the design, conduct and analysis of evaluations.
Feminist evaluation techniques can help us think this through. In this vein of theory and practice we are not just observers, not assessing a petri dish. We’re part of the action. I wrote about that same notion, of getting rid of objectivity, here (and it is usefully discussed in this 2025 blog by Sai Rengupta). Objectivity is an illusion that cuts us off from the people and communities we’re working with. It disguises our own part in the embedded power relationships of donors and “the poor” or “the vulnerable” or “the marginalized.”
The feminist evaluation premise means not only that the manner of conducting the evaluation leaves no one behind. It means seeking disparate and ignored voices, and interrogating systems of power. It means you’ll question your own privilege. And it means that design and direction are not solely in the hands of one, external, western-educated team lead. In fact, the evaluation is a learning opportunity as much for that team lead as it is for everyone.
Direct resources differently
The international evaluator needs humility in the face of knowledge he has never encountered or skills she’ll never master. She needs to be curious and proactive. They need to take the initiative to inform themselves on local evaluation practices and ways of thinking. They need to set up and stick to a plan that values the voices of all the team members.
But this is not enough.
It’s not enough because, first, we can’t rely on international evaluators to work more inclusively out of the goodness of their hearts. They won’t. Not because their hearts aren’t good. Some may not be, but most probably are pretty nice people. They may not know what they don’t know. They may not have or demand time to work better. And there are global goods that accrue to them (to me, to us) by perpetuating the system as-is.
What has to change is resourcing. If traditional bilateral or multilateral donors are funding your evaluation, this means battles (plural). Evaluators will have to expand clients’ expectations of what an evaluation can and should do. Language on localization is helpful. Most donors are talking about this now, though their level of commitment ranges from not much to just barely. The battles include fighting for:
- Local team leadership
- National evaluators leading design and instrumentation and analysis
- Evaluation calendar aligned with national needs
- Resources for team discussions about what learning would be useful
- Resources for learning and co-creating events
It can be helpful to take a breath and think about all the things an evaluation does. It’s not only about project outcomes: it’s an intervention of its own, and it has unintended consequences that can actually be harnessed and utilized. Evaluations are relationships, even if they have time limits, and the way evaluations are carried out truly matters. Mutual learning is often an important part of the conduct of an external evaluation, even if it’s not quantified or included in the contract.
Mutual learning includes the evaluation funders, as well. Hierarchies that dictate action are inherently unequal, and evaluators (international and national) can feed back to funders in ways implementers might not be able to, because of the principles of evaluation and independence. Being independent from the funders (and not just the implementers) requires some courage while it opens up space to discuss how they value their investments. Is it just the project outcomes that matter, or the way of working, the patterns of equity along the way, the respect for and responsibility to affected populations?
Push back
Push back on donor timelines using their own language of localization and capacity development policies. On-the-job learning is a very efficient use of resources. Pinched budgets also often rely on an expectation that an international team lead conducts most key tasks. They interview government officials, facilitate sessions, conduct focus groups. This is usually both unrealistic and detrimental. Local evaluation team members who speak the language, know the context deeply, and are not “donor representatives” are often the better choice for interviews with government officials.
You can also share session facilitation – either within a given session or across multiple sessions – and in this way may produce more varied and interesting results. Groups facilitated by an outsider may not be as rich. There are often cultural norms about discussing negative opinions, and language limitations. These arguments can help convince funders to fund more time for the local team. Or, if the funder is willing, for seating the team leadership locally. If it’s helpful, there can be cheaper methodological support from an international evaluator remotely.
There has been enormous job loss in this sector in the last 18 months. I’d be tone-deaf to say, “Sure, it’s time for all donor-funded evaluations to have local leads!” I don’t know that I believe that myself. There’s space for collaboration and international evaluators bring useful experience and tools. They just have to beat back any superiority complexes they might have. (Ahem.) Bilateral and multilateral funders also still want to see their own values reflected in implementation and evaluation. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do this much, much better in collaboration.
Conclusion
Evaluation team leadership changes what’s examined and evaluated, how it’s analyzed, and how the report reads. And that’s fine. These are rich environments. We have missed a lot by only ever having international evaluators. Local evaluation leadership will bring out interpretations and utilization that foreign evaluators never imagined. That’s better than fine, that’s the point. It’s time we international evaluators did our part in the uphill battle with funders to make local evaluation team leadership the norm.
The same is true for mutual learning as part of evaluation team processes. By shifting leadership, evaluators from different traditions can create a capacity building environment that is not simply one-way. It’s a long-term lesson to learn, but a necessary one: evaluations aren’t just about the business end of a theory of change. They’re interventions of their own, and we evaluators have effects that we need to take ownership of, and improve upon.
Bibliography
Sengupta, Rai. 2025. What does feminist evaluation offer for M&E in fragile and conflict-affected settings? Feminist evaluation approaches blog, BetterEvaluation.orgMade in Africa Evaluation Handbook African Evaluation Association,
Voluntary Organizations of Professional Evaluators International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation
New Directions and Debates in Evaluation: Voices from the Global South (brief, based on) Taneja, Mahima. “New Directions & Debates in Evaluation: Voices from Global South.” Colombo: Community of Evaluators-South Asia Evaluation Conclave 2025. May 2025. Community of Evaluators – South Asia (CoESA)
Cloete, F. 2016. Developing an Africa-rooted Programme Evaluation Approach, University of the Free State, Bloemfontain, South Africa.
What resources are you finding? Let me know in the comments.
GIF by Iris,Helen,silvy from Pixabay
