Positive and lasting change comes from within, not without:  I strongly believe true and sustainable peace, development, justice, and good governance come from within, not from without.

The people most affected by a situation must own and lead the change process; their views must shape the design and implementation of interventions, and their measure of success or failure of the changes in lives count above what external actors believe. 

In more than 37 years of my work in supporting international humanitarian and development work that cover the design, implementation, and evaluation of a wide range of interventions across Africa and beyond, I have always lived the frustrations of seeing how the voices and views of the people development interventions seek to help seldom count in the design, implementation, and evaluation of development interventions. I have witnessed how large investments in interventions seldom move the needle on changing the situations they seek to address. I have witnessed the anxiety of development agencies to meet donors’ accountability standards; the desperate search for success stories on the part of intervention designers and implementers; and the fatigue and cynicism from the limited experience of transformative changes on the part of participating communities that dutifully participate in different iterations of the same or similar interventions - all because of the mismatch between expectations and measures of what counts as meaningful change in the lives of the people interventions seek to serve.

My research and evaluation work, as well as my publications on different aspects in the field, have highlighted the need to see and measure change from the perspectives of those who live the development situation. I have always believed that, while participatory approaches are great, real participation happens when there is trust and confidence between the evaluator and the evaluated. For this reason, building evaluation exercises based on the knowledge of local experts with connections and access to the communities they evaluate is critical to ensuring that the evaluated can speak openly, genuinely, and in critical but constructive ways that ensure their views and experiences count in shaping the delivery of services that address their real needs. 

This is why I am excited to co-lead, with Carlisle Levine, our Strengthening Evaluation Contracting Partnerships Initiative (SECPI), which seeks to create the kinds of partnerships that enable small and solo community-based evaluation firms to bring their unique evaluation assets to support the design and conduct of evaluations that work for all. We believe this need for inclusive, locally-led evaluation is important across all geographies and so, we hope to contribute to improving the quality of evaluation outcomes in all parts of the world.