Johanna Pennarz, Lead Evaluation Officer at IOE, and Prashanth Kotturi, Evaluation Officer at IOE, have published a blogpost on EvalForward entitled ‘Making voices count - Gathering community feedback in times of remote evaluation’.

In the post, Pennarz and Kotturi present the pandemic-induced remote data collection methodology adopted to evaluate the National Programme Community Empowerment project in Indonesia. The evaluation used a bottom-up approach by examining the experiences and perceived benefits of community groups, first through interviews and then by triangulating these with the perspectives and views of project staff such as village facilitators, district facilitators and regency facilitators.

In discussing the findings, strengths and challenges of the evaluation, the authors highlight that although the evaluation was able to provide valuable insights into the ability of Community Driven Development to give control of decisions and resources to communities, it was not able to attain its original purpose of contributing to mutual learning and community empowerment. This notwithstanding, the authors conclude that, in a pandemic-constrained context, a remote evaluation is better than no evaluation.

Read more: https://www.evalforward.org/blog/making-voices-count