Seminar on project monitoring and evaluation

ldvlp2651  2019-2020  Louvain-la-Neuve

Seminar on project monitoring and evaluation
Note from June 29, 2020
Although we do not yet know how long the social distancing related to the Covid-19 pandemic will last, and regardless of the changes that had to be made in the evaluation of the June 2020 session in relation to what is provided for in this learning unit description, new learnig unit evaluation methods may still be adopted by the teachers; details of these methods have been - or will be - communicated to the students by the teachers, as soon as possible.
5 credits
20.0 h + 10.0 h
Q1
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


Programmes / formations proposant cette unité d'enseignement (UE)

Title of the programme
Sigle
Credits
Prerequisites
Aims
Master [120] in Population and Development Studies