Seminar on project monitoring and evaluation

Teacher(s)

De Leener Philippe;

Language

French

Content

The seminar will address two main questions: (1) what evaluating a development project or program does actually mean and what purpose does it serve ultimately? (2) how to practically carry out an evaluation in a creative and purposeful manner ? The seminar will particularly target new approaches, tools and methods (from the practice standpoint: how to do things?) but also new concepts and conceptions (from a more theoretical angle: how to properly construe and reason?). African situations and development dynamics will be major references.
The seminar is split in four complementary parts: (1) presenting a landscape of major challenges, difficulties but also promising opportunities in the field of project evaluation at large, (2) exploring two profoundly divergent planning rationale regularly at the roots of development projects (ex ante and ex post), (3) deepening specific approaches for evaluating poverty alleviation project, gender-sensitive programs or dynamics, people participation in development programs, and the like, (4) delivering conceptual keys and practical methods to rigorously assess effects, impacts and changes at various levels (individuals, structures and society) in the wake of projects deliberately targeting change in the realm of the “society machinery”.
From the very beginning, the seminar will focus the development of critical thinking and questioning (how to make the right question be elaborated at the right time?).

Teaching methods

Participatory and active methods will be prioritized from the beginning. Practical lived-through student experiences will be particularly valued.

Evaluation methods

Written examination. Four reflection questions in close connection with subject matters that have been deepened during the seminar.

Faculty or entity

PSAD