IDEV’s evaluation strategy emphasizes learning from evaluations and promoting an evaluation culture.
As one of the founding partners, of Twende Mbele, a peer learning initiative amongst African countries launched in 2017, IDEV has actively shared knowledge and its processes from the outset with the members. In 2022 and 2023, three IDEV Knowledge Management Officers have on separate occasions contributed to Twende Mbele brown-bag lunchtime events on the theme of “Embedding Knowledge Management & Communication in the M&E Process”. The events targeted government staff in particular and other development stakeholders in general. A combined total of over 350 attendees tuned in to learn about IDEV’s strategic approach to knowledge management and communications, and gain insight into operational process used by the IDEV team to achieve maximum uptake and value of their evaluations.
Developing a dissemination plan
On 16 February 2023, IDEV Principal Knowledge Management Officer, Jacqueline Nyagahima, participated in a Twende Mbele Brown bag lunch event, during which she shared the IDEV approach to disseminating evaluation findings. Speaking to an audience of over sixty participants, Ms. Nyagahima first spoke IDEV’s mission to ensure accountability and learning for the African Development Bank, before expanding to IDEV’s role in capacity building for Bank staff and other evaluation teams; and building a culture of evaluation for development stakeholders in African countries.
Moving to the central theme of embedding Knowledge Management and Communication into a M&E process, she then explained that for each evaluation produced by IDEV, the knowledge management and communication division sets out a strategy to maximize the impact of its findings. This takes the form of a Communication & Dissemination Plan tailored to the subject matter of the evaluation and the stakeholders it should impact and according to the evaluation’s ability to reach the four overarching objectives set by IDEV; ie. to improve the impact of the Bank’s interventions; to bring about change by targeting influencers; to contribute to knowledge on development and to raise the visibility of IDEV’s evaluative knowledge & solutions.
Stakeholder mapping
On 11 November 2022, IDEV Principal Knowledge Management Officer, Dieter Gijsbrechts, participated in a Twende Mbele Brown bag lunch event, during which he shared the IDEV approach to stakeholder mapping as part of IDEV’s efforts to maximize the reach and value of evaluation products to a targeted audience.
Speaking to an audience of over 120 virtual attendees, Mr. Gijsbrechts introduced the importance of stakeholder mapping, explaining that different audiences for evaluations had different knowledge needs. In IDEV’s case, there was both an internal audience within the African Development Bank, and an external audience which depended on factors such as the sector, the theme and the geographical location covered by the evaluation. Additional soft factors of stakeholder mapping should take into consideration individual use of, interest in and engagement with the evaluation ecosystem. The full range of factors should be leveraged to determine how to best target each audience. Once mapped, it was important to maximize uptake of evaluation findings by conceptualizing a suite of knowledge and communications products and activities, from product briefs through to dissemination workshops.
Communicating on evaluation to increase demand
On 31 August 2022, IDEV Acting Division Manager of the Knowledge Management, Outreach, and Capacity Development Division, Jayne Musumba, led a Twende Mbele Brown bag lunch event, during which she shared the IDEV approach to communicating on evaluation to increase demand. This event provided insights on the knowledge sharing and dissemination experience from IDEV, paying particular attention to communicating and sharing around evaluation.
Speaking to an audience of over 165 participants, Ms. Musumba explained the rationale for a strong focus on communication of evaluations, saying the knowledge, findings and lessons learned should be available, valued and utilized to improve development effectiveness. Communication should serve to stimulate stakeholder engagement and trigger demand for more knowledge, resulting in a virtuous learning circle. Ms. Musumba listed the sources of IDEV evaluative knowledge as being the IDEV website and social media; IDEV publications and sub-products; capacity building partnerships such as the Twende Mbele initiative; knowledge events including the biennial AfDB Evaluation Week; and the Evaluation Results Database, which served to feed evaluative knowledge back into interventions of the AfDB. Ms. Musumba spoke of measuring the impact of communications internally at the AfDB through the analysis of the uptake of IDEV evaluative knowledge in the Bank’s new policies, strategies and action plans; and through the concrete implementation of IDEV recommendations. Communication impact to a wider audience of development stakeholders was measurable through social media engagement, website statistics and general awareness of IDEV work at knowledge events in Africa and beyond.
About the Twende Mbele partnership
At the heart of Twende Mbele is a desire to move beyond a network of people just sharing experience, toward a partnership where countries collaborate on developing and implementing M&E systems that improve government performance and impact on citizens. Twende engages with a variety of national governments who are interested to use M&E to strengthen government performance and accountability to citizens.
For me, the value of network like Twende Mbele is that it is truly peer-to-peer. What you often see in the capacity development space is that it is donor to beneficiary, which creates quite a different relationship...
The value for governments collaborating on national M&E systems is that they can learn from each other, they can see where one is perhaps more advanced than others and what lessons they can draw from that and it's an opportunity for mutual exchange...
If a government is committed to evaluating its own performance and learning from its successes but also learning from failure, it will also be open to to learning from citizens and being more open to their expectations."
Karen Rot-Münstermann, AfDB Evaluator General, speaking on the value of the Twende Mbele network.