Development, a world of programs and policies that seek to address complex problems, the ability to discern what works is vital. This role is inherently carried out by evaluation. Evaluation refers to the systematic judgement of how a project/program/policy is working, whether it is achieving its intended results, is affecting change, and or whether resource usage is appropriate.
The development sector is ever-expanding and constantly evolving, and evaluation becomes an important connector. It enables organisations and decision-makers to learn from experience, make informed decisions, adapt/improve programming in real-time, and deliver improved results for the communities served. However, in regions defined as low- and middle-income regions such as Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, there are unique factors that impede evaluations and research.
Evaluations in the Global South are complicated due to issues of poverty, inequality, systemic gaps in infrastructure, governance, and economic access for demographics. For the effective evaluation in low- and middle-income contexts, it is not just a matter of demonstrating whether something works, but whether the intervention is improving lives and reaching the people at the last mile. This article examines some of the learning from emerging innovations which are reshaping evaluation in these regions.
Stories of Impact from the Global South
The significance of community involvement cannot be overstated. For instance, while conducting Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) practices in Santa village, Morena district, Madhya Pradesh, India, farmers themselves were completely involved in the assessment of agricultural programs. The communities evaluated their own resources, problems, and developments. This is fundamentally important because a possible solution is based/relevant to community realities. In this case, the outcome has been more durable because the stakeholder communities were fully engaged with the design and evaluation of the program.
If we look globally, context is everything. For instance, South Africa’s National Evaluation Policy Framework (NEPF) institutionalizes locally led assessments that integrate indigenous knowledge and adapt to the country’s social and political landscape. The emphasis on local contexts ensures that evaluations align with the national agendas and priorities instead of external funder agendas. Moreover, research on African evaluation systems highlights the importance of integrating indigenous practices, such as storytelling, rituals, and local languages into evaluation frameworks. This approach ensures that evaluations are not only methodologically sound but also culturally resonant and contextually appropriate, reinforcing the importance of local context in development practice. Furthermore, in East Africa, the use of cultural assets is already in place, such as, the execution of community theatre to carry out evaluations of social programs in gender equity and health. Local actors perform stories that are reflective of people’s lived experiences and facilitate audience discussions. This process not only respects the cultural routines but also allows the audience to unpack their own feelings and attitudes about the program in ways that a traditional survey could not achieve.
Real-World Roadblocks
Despite progress, systemic challenges remain. Donor agendas often dominate local interests. For example, international donors often prioritize easily measurable targets for funding rather than issues such as gender dynamics and trust. Additionally, in remote and conflict-ridden areas, it is difficult to cull out relevant context data. During the Ebola crisis, mobile-based health surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa filled critical gaps by collecting real-time symptoms and resource data in regions with crumbling infrastructure. In Uganda, the World Health Organization implemented a cutting-edge tool, Go.Data, to investigate the outbreak and contact tracing. This tool helped frontline health workers in optimizing the collection of data and sharing it in real-time. Therefore, enhancing positive surveillance and decision-making during Ebola outbreaks. This digital initiative not only surpassed the need for paper records but also enabled faster and more accurate responses.
Still, these innovations are chronically under-funded, not only because there is little political will or institutional capacity, but ultimately because there are ingrained cultural and linguistic mismatches where the evaluation ecosystem is concerned. Digital tools, such as Go.Data and mobile-based survey applications, hold promise to guide organizations in creating evaluations in the moment and within the dynamics of their evaluation, but when these tools are designed, funded, and piloted, they fail to embed the practices and trajectories of language and since these processes often take on their own ways, it is difficult to think about scale and sustainability.
One of these challenges is also how evaluation is envisaged and framed. The future of evaluation continues to be led in colonial languages like English and French in global development practice. These may be the languages of the donors, the governments, and the international organizations, but they become the languages of exclusion for many in the population. Drafting outlines for evaluations, employing qualitative methods through interviews or focus group discussions with participants, developing analytical frameworks, sampling, weighing normative assessments of difference and producing knowledge through evidencing practice often implicates local dialects, but excluding indigenous peoples’ languages and other non-verbal cultural exemplars is well-documented by cultural anthropologists. The marginalization of Indigenous Linguistic Diversity (ILD) through measures of instrument or analysis construct not only limits involvement, but it also distorts conclusions and undermines the credibility of the evaluation.
A paper titled ‘Why aren’t we there yet?: Understanding and addressing donor barriers to localization in climate adaptation’ by a global think tank, ODI, demystifies this issue. Donors, especially large bilateral and multilateral agencies, often use short-term, project-based funding strategies to mitigate risk and exert control over outcomes. Most funding strategies typically emphasize easily measurable results, for example, the number of people trained, or the amount of infrastructure built, that align with donor reporting requirements.
Thus, it is typically the combination of risk analysis and reporting compliance that prevents donors from utilizing local organizations or groups to implement projects and instead opts for international direct grantees. This reduces the amount of funding for local actors and their control over project design, activities, implementation and evaluation. A specific example comes from climate adaptation projects implemented in Africa and Asia. In general, local organizations are well-positioned to deliver services and implement projects, however, donors are frequently unsure about the capacity of due diligence to manage large amounts of funding when local actors could meet transparency measures, standards and procedures that are aligned with international standards. Consequently, the flow of money was shifted to international non-governmental organizations or international consulting firms with set agendas that adhere to donor requirements, rather than local measures of adaptation.
Conclusion
Ultimately, technology bridges data gaps. Mobile phone surveys, like the ones to monitor Ebola outbreaks in real-time in remote areas, and similarly, AI and earth satellite tools to monitor changes to the environment, are transformative low-cost options to implement. They help to create an environment for a serious opportunity for implementations. But these technologies need to be accessible, locally relevant, and cost effective for Global South. If there are innumerable high-tech tools at display, but aren’t easily accessible, then its no better than a alienated machinery.
Furthermore, locally led evaluation frameworks also transfer power to the communities. South Africa’s evaluation policy is a good example of this, favoring locally developed experts for evaluations and not foreign consultants, ensuring evaluations reflect national culture while building local capacity. Additionally, culturally grounded methods contribute to inclusion, for example, the use of community theatre in East Africa helps change the evaluation to a participatory process that includes dialogue which is consistent with oral traditions to build trust.
Thus, evaluation in the Global South is changing in positive ways through innovation and resilience. The way forward is to integrate globally relevant tools and focus on local knowledge and centering the community, invest in locally grown capacity, and accept methods that are based on the idea of cultural complexity. This way, evaluation will enable equitable and sustainable change.
