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Welcome to our monthly roundup of new and noteworthy evaluation news and resources – here is the latest.

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New and Noteworthy — Reads

Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Network on Development Evaluation (EvalNet) laid out six evaluation criteria to support consistent, high-quality evaluation in the early 2000s. However, there was never a document to help evaluators and others understand these criteria and improve their use. OECD just released Applying Evaluation Criteria Thoughtfully. This document is meant to explore the criteria in detail by explaining what they are and how they are meant to be used.

Tools and Tips for Implementing Contribution Analysis

The Centre for Evaluation Innovation recently published a quick guide for implementing contribution analysis. The guide outlines what contribution analysis is and the six steps practitioners can take to implement it. The author also outlines challenges they have seen when conducting these types of evaluations and some ideas of how to mitigate those challenges. As always, the Centre for Evaluation Innovation has provided a very simple, practical document to help guide your practice.

Indigenous Made in Africa Evaluation Frameworks

The most recent American Journal of Evaluation published this article by Bagele Chilisa and Donna M. Mertens. This article discusses how issues of culture, ethics, and values from an Indigenous paradigm perspective have largely been ignored by international agencies when framing evaluations. This article describes an “Indigenous paradigmatic framework and then narrows the focus to a Made in Africa approach to evaluation that is designed to redress the epistemic violence perpetrated by the use of a Western Cultural lens to determine evaluation approaches.”

Using Twitter Data for Development Research and Evaluation

The World Bank and IEG staff shared their experience in a webinar using sentiment analysis (including using Twitter data) as a tool for collecting data for development research and evaluation. This article is a summary of the lessons from that webinar. If you are interested in using social media data for data collection, this is a good high-level overview of the benefits, opportunities, and risks.