AfrED: Working together to curate African evaluations

25 February 2020 - Dr Angelita Kiwekete, Researcher

How we curate and use information in 21st century Africa can be disheartening. In the M&E arena for instance, African states hardly take into account the signals from evaluations to inform their policies and programmes. Why? One reason is that most M&E efforts are carried out with sector-specific development partners. Commendable M&E systems may develop, but they are cut off from national development plans and M&E data is not systematically fed into government data collection and reporting systems. Poor demand for evidence in policy and decision-making also plays a role limiting the curation of information. Another reason is the diversity of information and stakeholders involved in M&E in Africa.

How can we hope to embed evaluation into informing national, continental and global development imperatives without curated evaluations?

The African Evaluation Database (AfrED) is a growing, centralized repository of evaluation reports and journal articles on M&E, jointly developed and run by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST) at Stellenbosch University, and CLEAR-AA at the University of Witwatersrand since 2017. Going forward, AfrED¡¯s success will be evident in how it gets used. Will we see African governments, development partners and civil society drawing on AfrED to improve national evaluation systems? Will CLEAR-AA itself and the wider academic community use AfrED to build on existing research and write about M&E in Africa? Try out AfrED repository here.