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USAID Contribution

Hiring Local Evaluators: Share Your Experience with USAID

Mar 07, 2014
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This request comes from Cindy Clapp-Wincek, Director of USAID's Office of Learning, Evaluation, and Research in the Bureau for Policy, Planning, and Learning.

Several colleagues from outside the Agency have started a discussion about who should select the local evaluators that serve on evaluation teams. A summary of the discussion is provided by Jim Rugh here:

“As you may have seen on an AEA365 post, our Russian friend and evaluation colleague, Alexey Kuzmin, recommended that evaluators asked to conduct evaluations in other countries engage local evaluators on their teams.

Now Aru Rasappan of the Malaysian Evaluation Society, who has done many international evaluations himself, has written that, in his experience, it is the client/donor agency that typically selects the local evaluators (if any), and that, again in his experience, the local evaluators the client has hired have not been as qualified as the ones he would have selected through contacts who are members of the national VOPE (Voluntary Organization for Professional Evaluation, i.e. association/society/network).

As you know, an easy way to find and make contact with a national VOPE is to search the interactive map or alphabetical list on www.IOCE.net.”

USAID's ADS 203 on evaluation highly recommends having local evaluators on evaluation teams, and we are interested in hearing from our partners on this issue.

  • Have you been on a team with local evaluators (or are you a local evaluator)?
  • How often are local evaluators included on evaluation teams?
  • Who generally selects and hires the local evaluators?
  • What has worked well? What hasn’t?

We welcome your thoughts on these questions.