Evaluating democracy & governance-focused development programs

This is an in-person event for current U-M students. Students must attend the session in its entirety. This event will not be livestreamed.

How do donors assess whether their democracy and governance (D&G)-focused programs are progressing towards anticipated results?

This workshop will challenge students to consider how donors monitor and evaluate programmatic change, particularly within the D&G space. The workshop’s case study will feature an implementing partner program supporting credible elections in an unspecified country. Donors often rely on local implementing partner organizations to design and carry out their programs.

This workshop will begin with a brief overview of a tool that implementing partners use to communicate their approach to programming and how they’ll monitor progress. This tool is an Activity Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Plan (AMELP). This workshop will then provide students with a hands-on opportunity to engage with two components of an AMELP: a results framework and indicators. These two AMELP sections are foundational as they articulate how an activity theorizes how it will affect a specific change and what indicators it will use to measure that change. 

After discussing the AMELP tool and understanding the importance of results frameworks and indicators, students will work in teams to assess whether a given results framework, indicators and/or logical framework accurately reflect the case study’s anticipated programmatic change. Students will have the opportunity to make additions, deletions, and identify gaps in the provided results frameworks and indicators.

By the end of the workshop, students will have gained a better understanding of how donors use AMELPs to assess the impact of implementing partners’ D&G programs. They will also have gained a better understanding of results frameworks and indicators, including the pitfalls of these frameworks, particularly within the D&G context.

Facilitator

This workshop will be led by Tina Byenkya, a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Advisor with USAID/Somalia. Tina Byenkya has over 15 years of experience in international development, with a focus on monitoring and evaluation, at the donor and implementing partner level. She enjoys designing and managing systems that ask the right questions, collect timely information, and create continuous spaces for reflection. Her professional background also includes managing strategic planning processes and using timely information to tell stories about programming across multiple countries in Africa and Asia. Ms. Byenkya holds an MA in International Development from American University and a BA in International Relations from the University of Michigan. Tina is originally from Uganda.

• IPC
• Tina Byenkya
• Somalia