11th AfrEA International Conference
The 11th AfrEA International Conference will be held in Kigali, Rwanda from 18-22 March 2024. The theme for the conference is “Technology and Innovation in Evaluation Practice in Africa: The Last Nail on the Coffin of Participatory Approaches?”. The conference provides an opportunity for participants from Africa and around the world to submit and present papers and posters, chair panels, and facilitate professional development workshops. The conference aims to promote AfrEA’s “Made in Africa Evaluation” approach, which emphasizes the importance of evaluation practices that are contextually relevant and responsive to African needs. It serves as a platform for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking with a diverse range of international organizations and individuals. 3ie will be participating in two sessions at this conference.
3ie at AfrEA 2024
Strand 10: How ‘colonial’ is impact evaluation in Africa? Insights from 3ie’s Development Evidence Portal
Thursday, 21 March 2024, 12:00-13:00 CAT
Observers have noted the limited involvement and leadership by local researchers in impact evaluation in the Global South, and in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in particular. Not only is it ethically dubious for research to be conducted primarily by outsiders, but studies without substantive involvement of local researchers are likely to be of poorer quality and have less chance of informing policy decisions. However, so far there has been no precise analysis of exactly how widespread this phenomenon is. The Development Evidence Portal (DEP), a database maintained by 3ie, provides a rich dataset that can shed light on this question. The DEP contains over 10,000 impact evaluations (IEs) from which author lists and affiliations have been extracted.
In this session, we will present how using the DEP dataset, we analysed authorship patterns of published IEs conducted in SSA. In particular, we look at the overall percentage of IEs with and without authors affiliated to institutions located in the country of study. For IEs with both local authors and authors based in high-income countries (HICs), we look at the prevalence of first authorship for local and HIC authors.
Presenter: Zafeer Ravat, Research Associate, 3ie