Efforts at making evaluation culturally relevant have become central to evaluation discourses globally. However, global attempts at culturally responsive practice have not succeeded in incorporating African voices. This article discusses African perspectives on decolonization and indigenization of evaluation. It further provides a description of an African relational evaluation paradigm as a basis for originating evaluation practices and theories rooted in African world views, and provides examples of evaluation studies that illustrate relational evaluation approaches. It makes claims for an African evaluation tree metaphor that features approaches to evaluation in Africa by African theorists.

This issue of the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation (CJPE) is one of our most comprehensive to date. Not only does it include five full articles, fi ve practice notes, and two book reviews, but it also covers a wide range of evaluation-related topics, practices, and studies. I am pleased to note that our editorial team contin ues to receive high-quality submissions, and I encourage you to keep thinking of the CJPE as an outlet for your work. The articles and practice notes included in this issue focus on four recurring themes that reflect current topics in our field. First, evaluative thinking and capac ity building in non-governmental organizations is the subject of articles by Rog ers, Kelly, and McCoy, as well as by Lu, Elliot, and Perlman. Both articles provide insights into the facilitators of, and barriers to, evaluation capacity building as well as the multiple roles played by evaluators in fostering evaluative thinking amongst organizational staff members. Second, process evaluation appears to be of interest to many evaluators and researchers: Leblanc, Gervais, Dubeau and Delame focus on process evaluation for mental health initiatives, while Parrott and Carman pro vide an example of how process evaluation can contribute to program scaling-up efforts. Chechak, Dunlop, and Holosko also focus on process evaluation and its utility in evaluating youth drop-in programs. Teachers and students of evaluation may be interested in our third theme, which focuses on student contributions to evaluation, both through peer-mentoring-as described in the practice note written by LaChenaye, Boyce, Van Draanen, and Everett-and through the CES Student Evaluation Case Competition-described in a practice note written by Sheppard, Baker, Lolic, Soni, and Courtney. And fourth, we continue to advance our methodological approaches to evaluation, and this is reflected in an article on evaluation in Indigenous contexts by Chandna, Vine, Snelling, Harris, Smylie, and Manson, as well as in an article on the use of an outcome monitoring tool for performance measurement in a clinical psychology setting by Rosval, Yamin, Jamshidi, and Aubry. Czechowski, Sylvestre, and Moreau also feature methods in their practice note on secure data handling for evaluators, a key competency that continues to evolve as our data collection and storage mechanisms adapt to new technology. In addition to these articles and practice notes, this issue also features two book reviews that are sure to interest our readers. First, Bhawra provides an account of

Botswana has a long history of indigenous marital therapy. This indigenous therapy is embodied in the indigenous philosophy of motho ke motho ka batho (I am because we are). This philosophy promotes togetherness, connectedness, collectiveness, compassion, love and harmony and the building of sustainable relationships among families. The paper explores some of the indigenous therapeutic marital approaches used during wedding ceremonies amongst them, songs, proverbs and group counselling. It also argues that these indigenous marital approaches build family relations and are a continuous source of therapy for the married couple; in addition to relieving women from marital stress and maintaining strong family relationships even after the marriage has ended.

Traditional premarital counseling seems threatened and not benefiting the couple as it should be. This has negatively impacted on the establishment of marriage. The purpose of the study was to explore married women lived experiences on the value of traditional premarital counseling, go laya, on marital stability. Traditional premarital counseling has always existed to help prepare couples for the future challenges and expectations in marriage. The study adopted a qualitative phenomenological research design. A purposive sample of 10 married women with varied durations in marriage provided the data through interviews. These interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed. The transcripts assumed a phenomenological approach where bracketing and eidetic reduction were employed. The findings indicate that the traditional premarital counseling is very valuable and has a potential of keeping marriages firm. In addition, although the traditional premarital counseling is an appropriate antidivorce strategy, the main problem is that it has lately lost its meaning. Unlike in the past, it is no longer given the honor and not conducted in depth. Despite the major role go laya has in marriage, its implementation must be reviewed and documented to give direction on how it should be done.

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