Thinking Contextually and Theoretically about Evaluations

This session was organized under the capacity building initiative in partnership with BMGF. In this session, two leaders in the evaluation field Michael Woolcock and Patricia Rogers presented on a range of different ideas. Michael Woolcock, Lead Social Scientist in the World Bank's Development Research Group presented on “Context, Trajectories and Theories: Or, the Necessity But Insufficiency of Sound Methods for Effective Evaluation”. Amongst other takeaways, some learnings from Mr. Woolcock’s presentation include: (i) sound theory is essential for interpretation, explanation and drawing inferences; (ii) counterfactuals would be needed against which we can assess impacts.

Patricia Rogers, CEO of BetterEvaluation presented on “Qualitative Evaluation”. Here some of the takeaways included the need for multidisciplinary teams that can cover both quantitative and qualitative data, the need to use interim findings used to design the next stage of implementation and to focus on presenting ‘findings to evaluation questions’ rather than ‘methods’.