Professor Seidu Al-Hassan with participants at the workshop in Tamale
The University for Development Studies (UDS) in collaboration with the Mastercard Foundation has held a three-day design workshop on developing a ‘Proof-of-Concept (PoC) for Made-in-Africa Evaluation’ in Tamale, the Northern region.
The workshop follows a maiden work stream of the PoC project, which involved a landscaping analysis of indigenous Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) approaches in 15 countries across the North, Central and West Africa regions.
The goal of the design workshop is to bring together experts including thought leaders, practitioners, gender and youth, and indigenous knowledge keepers to provide deeper knowledge and insights towards developing strong inclusive MEL tools that are rooted in local contexts and are culturally relevant and sensitive to the African people, with the aim to improve the ways evaluation is perceived, designed, and used in Africa.
Vice-Chancellor of the University for Development Studies (UDS), Professor Seidu Al-Hassan, at the workshop said Africans do not have ways and means to tell their own story.
“There’s development but how do you let people know you are developing and so this workshop is about how Africans can rethink, re-imagine and move away from the colonial mentality that they have to wait for somebody to come and tell them that they are either developing, undeveloped or developed,” he said.
He was optimistic that the experts brought together will build upon the previous initiative about how Africans can measure their own development.
“So we are rethinking and coming up with new tools that we can use to measure impact. What we do in African we make great impact but the problem has always been that our stories are not always well documented so Africans have numerous ways of telling their stories but because their stories are not well documented only few people hear about it,” he said.
Professor Al-Hassan encouraged tertiary institutions and second cycle institutions to find a way to mainstream the recommendations of the workshop into their curriculum activities.
Sulley Gariba was a major contributor to the AfrEA efforts to decolonize evaluation by promoting high quality evaluations led by, and rooted in Africa, including evaluation theory and practice that is relevant and responsive to African contexts and needs, which is now known as the Made in Africa Evaluation.
BY Eric Kombat, Tamale
