The 13th Biennial Conference of the European Evaluation Society (EES) took place from 1 to 5 October 2018 in Thessaloniki, Greece. The leading theme of the EES2018 Conference was “Evaluation for more resilient societies" and the conference included five days of debates on evaluation in times of financial, geopolitical, environmental and humanitarian crises.

The Director of the Independent Office of Evaluation of IFAD (IOE), Mr Oscar A. Garcia, took part in the conference and presented his new book "Evaluation for Inclusive and Sustainable Rural Transformation: World Bank Series on Evaluation and Development, Volume 9" during a Café Session. He also participated in a panel session on the UN's evaluation functions for more resilient societies.

Ms Johanna Pennarz, IOE Lead Evaluation Officer and Mr Hansdeep Khaira, IOE Evaluation Officer, organized two roundtable sessions: Evaluations in Fragile Contexts: How do they differ? and Enhancing the use of evaluation findings for decision making and reform processes, the latter in cooperation with World Food Programme. Ms Pennarz presented papers in two sessions, Learning from Evaluation and Evaluation Systems, while Mr Khaira presented the session entitled Conducting impact evaluations in difficult contexts using geo-spatial analysis.

The aim of the session Evaluations in Fragile Contexts: How do they differ? was to discuss the possible approaches for undertaking evaluations in fragile contexts, based on practical experiences from a range of different contexts. The expertise of the panellists covered a broad range of themes, including gender and rural poverty, humanitarian crisis, conflict and peace-building and development in fragile situations.

In the session entitled Enhancing the use of evaluation findings for decision making and reform processes – experience from IFAD and World Food Programme, Ms Pennarz presented IOE's progress in moving towards a more rigorous methodology on evaluation syntheses. Mr Khaira's presentation focused on the synthesis of the impact evaluation criterion in country strategy and programme evaluations (CSPEs).

In the session Learning from Evaluation, Ms Pennarz presented the synthesis methodologies used in four recent Evaluation Synthesis Reports (gender, scaling up partnerships and rural finance). She also presented the experience from the CSPE Egypt in the Evaluation Systems session.

Finally, Mr Khaira contributed to the session Conducting impact evaluations in difficult contexts using geo-spatial analysis, wherein he presented the methodological work related to geospatial analysis that was undertaken as part of IOE's impact evaluation of the Agriculture Support Project in Georgia.

Watch the interviews with Mr Oscar Garcia, IOE Director and Mr Hansdeep Khaira, Evaluation Officer

See conference photogallery

For more information on the event, visit the conference's website.

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