Donors often talk about #SustainableDevelopment, and we know they try. But do they return #expost project to #evaluate it? Here are lessons from #Nordic (#Norway, #Finland, #Sweden & #Denmark) and the #Netherlands in our #ValuingVoices #WhitePapers. Let us know what you think: PART 1: Toward Building Better Evaluation Practices: A…

Some of the rarely discussed myths of ‘sustainable development is that the aid we donors and implementers bring will help everyone, and that recipient governments can take over once donors leave and that what we left when the project ended was sustainable. The fact that our ‘global development aid’ helps…

Recently I’ve had conversations where I had to define which sustainability we were talking about. Was it: Ex-post-project sustainability of outcomes and impacts, Environmental sustainability, or Business sustainability? Since I spend most of my time evaluating the ex-post sustained and emerging impacts of foreign aid projects years after projects close…

Hello. My name is Jindra Cekan, and I am the Founder and Catalyst of Valuing Voices at Cekan Consulting LLC. Our research, evaluation and advocacy network have been working on post-project (ex-post) evaluations since 2013. Do we exit global development projects knowing our impacts are sustained? We hope so. As…

Webinar: Lessons from Nordic / the Netherlands’ ex-post project evaluations: 14 Jan 2021 In June-August 2020, a search was conducted through government databases of the four Nordic countries — Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark — and the Netherlands to identify ex-post evaluations of government-sponsored projects. The findings and recommendations for action are detailed in a four-part white paper series, beginning with a paper…

Do we exit global development projects knowing our impacts are sustained? We hope so. As Professor Bea Rogers of Tufts said after evaluating 12 projects 2 years post-closure (https://www.fsnnetwork.org/resource/exit-strategies-study), “Hope is Not a Strategy”, yet too often that is what projects that assume sustainability does. They/we hope. But is this…

As a global development industry, we have almost no evidence of how (un)sustained the outcomes or impacts of 99% of our projects because we have never returned to evaluate them. But from early indications based on the ex-posts, we have evaluated 2–20 years after donor departure it is, learning from…

This is what life of most ex-post evaluation researchers looks like, mostly without the counting congratulator: I recently spent three days looking for ex-post evaluations for a client across nearly a dozen organizations. I was hard-pressed to find 16 actual ones. Sorting through ‘impact evaluations’ that were done in the…

Rarely do funders return to evaluate (ex-post) what lasts after aid projects end, but when they do, we can find myriad pleasures: 1) sustainability of activities we launched and nurtured together and hoped would last as is, even 15 years later, or 2) new ways local participants or partners made…