Decolonizing and Indigenizing Evaluation Practice in Africa: Toward African Relational Evaluation Approaches

Abstract

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

Conceptualizing Evaluation in African Contexts

“…Cloete () asserts that the difference between an African and a Western evaluation paradigm is that an African evaluation paradigm is more sensitive to African cultural contexts and practices, with the aim of achieving the most accurate and valid results. Chilisa, Major, Gaotlhobogwe, and Mokgolodi (), Cloete (), and Chilisa, Major, and Khudu‐Petersen () posit that evaluation may be understood best when explained when employing the principles that consider the history, culture, values, worldviews, philosophies, and belief systems, that inform African experiences. The African‐rooted evaluation approaches help evaluators to evaluate with cultural lens that focus on African values, beliefs system, customs, ways of knowing, and ways of constructing knowledge.…”

“…Such frameworks must take into account the Indigenous peoples’ interests, knowledge, and experiences: “religions, cultural traditions, norms, language, metaphors, Indigenous knowledge systems, community stories, legends, folklores, social problems, rapid social changes, or public policies of the studies culture, as opposed to conceptual frameworks that emanate from some universalistic or developed world literature” (Adair as cited in Chilisa, , p.33). These frameworks must be rooted on African philosophical assumptions of relational ontology, axiology, epistemology, and methodology (Chilisa, ; Chilisa et al., , ). These are described next.…”

“…Chilisa and Malunga () and Chilisa et al. () presented four evaluation frameworks informed by African philosophies under what they called the African evaluation tree metaphor. The evaluation frameworks were depicted under four branches (Figure ).…”

Indigenising Evaluation Knowledge: Exploring the Epistemic Identity of African Evaluators

“…Within this context, a number of challenges have emerged, including the need for contextually relevant and utilisable evaluation results, and the need to increase the pool of competent African evaluators to ease the reliance on evaluators from the North. The knowledge-generation agenda through NMESs is happening within a trajectory of a growing discourse on the decolonisation of knowledge and indigenisation of evaluation in Africa (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018;Chilisa, Major, Gaotlhobogwe & Mokgolodi, 2016).…”

“…Such approaches are envisaged to incorporate cultural knowledge and values that guide understandings of and responses to developmental needs, priorities and African aspirations. The seminal works for this approach have been informed by African relational paradigms 1 as a basis for culturally relevant evaluations based on African worldviews (Chilisa, Major, Gaotlhobogwe & Mokgolodi, 2016;Chilisa & Malunga, 2012). However, this discussion has lacked both a broader theoretical linkage to the construction of knowledge, and a specific empirical foundation of the professional evaluation sector.…”