CRP 2020 Reviews: WHEAT

In 2020 the CGIAR CAS Secretariat is conducting independent reviews of the 12 CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs), including this one of WHEAT. The reviews will provide information on quality of science and effectiveness in each CRP. This review covers the Phase II years of 2017 through 2019, with a view to identifying lessons for future research modalities

CGIAR GENDER Platform: Evaluation Report

The summative and formative evaluation of the GENDER (Generating Evidence and New Directions for Equitable Results) Platform assessed its progress from January 2020 to October 2022, to document lessons and best practices, to also provide forward-looking recommendations for the newly transitioned CGIAR GENDER Impact Platform. The evaluation was conducted between October 2022 – June 2023 by the external team, which was led by an evaluation expert and comprised of three subject matter experts to specifically address Evidence, Methods, and Alliances modules of the Platform. This evaluation employed theory-based, utilization-focused, participatory, and feminist approaches aligned with CGIAR’s Evaluation Framework and Policies. The Platform evaluation readiness was determined by an evaluability assessment jointly carried out by the GENDER platform team, with facilitation and quality assurance under IAES, following the CGIAR evaluability assessment guidelines. The presentation of approaches and methodology of the evaluation and its novelties was shared with the wider audiences at the 2023 gLOCAL event: How Evaluations Contribute to Addressing The Greater Societal Issues: Evaluation of the CGIAR GENDER Platform Additional detail on methodology is provided in the Annex. Seven key evaluation questions were framed along the five evaluation criteria: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence, and sustainability. Quality of Science evaluation criteria was integrated into the specific evaluation sub-questions of the Evidence module study, to pretest the evaluation guidelines CGIAR on evaluating QoR4D in process and performance evaluations. The evaluation used three kinds of triangulation: investigator triangulation, data triangulation, and methodological triangulation. Mixed methods were employed, including: online survey (119 respondents- see survey blog), key informant interviews (84 participants), and desk reviews on Platform indicator data, annual reports, module financial data, and other secondary documents. Executive summaries of three module reports are includes in the Annex, complementing the Platform-wide evidence and conclusions. Responding to the key stakeholder groups, the evaluation made 11 recommendations for: the GENDER Platform and CGIAR management. Complementing lessons from other platform evaluations of Excellence in Breeding Platform and Big Data in Agriculture, lessons learnt from this evaluation of the GENDER platform that would apply to new CGIAR impact platforms. Please read the evaluation report with stand-alone annexes, and Management Response to the evaluation. Stay tuned for other knowledge management products

Developing evaluation standards and assessing evaluation quality

The article explains the rationale for the development of standards for evaluation practice, the process followed in developing those standards, and how those standards inform the quality assessment of evaluations. Quality assessment of evaluations are conducted as a routine activity of the South African National Evaluation System (NES). The importance of quality assessment for improving the state of evaluation practice in South Africa is illustrated by presenting results from the quality assessments undertaken to date. The paper concludes by discussing the progress on the development of a public Evaluations Repository to manage and provide access to completed evaluations and their quality assessment results, and offering some concluding analytical remarks

Enabling relational leadership in primary healthcare settings: lessons from the DIALHS collaboration

Strong management and leadership competencies have been identified as critical in enhancing health system performance. While the need for strong health system leadership has been raised, an important undertaking for health policy and systems researchers is to generate lessons about how to support leadership development (LD), particularly within the crisis-prone, resource poor contexts that are characteristic of Low- and Middle-Income health systems. As part of the broader DIALHS (District Innovation and Action Learning for Health Systems Development) collaboration, this article reflects on 5 years of action learning and engagement around leadership and LD within primary healthcare (PHC) services. Working in one sub-district in Cape Town, we cocreated LD processes with managers from nine PHC facilities and with the six members of the sub-district management team. Within this article, we seek to provide insights into how leadership is currently practiced and to highlight lessons about whether and how our approach to LD enabled a strengthening of leadership within this setting. Findings suggest that the sub-district is located within a hierarchical governance context, with performance monitored through the use of multiple accountability mechanisms including standard operating procedures, facility audits and target setting processes. This context presents an important constraint to the development of a more distributed, relational leadership. While our data suggest that gains in leadership were emerging, our experience is of a system struggling to shift from a hierarchical to a more relational understanding of how to enable improvements in performance, and to implement these changes in practice

Feminist Evaluation and Gender Approaches: There's a Difference?

Background: Feminist evaluation and gender approaches offer evaluators distinct ways of thinking and applying evaluations. A Namibian case narrative demonstrates how feminist evaluation and gender approaches, among others, resulted in a useful and used evaluation.  Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide readers with a historical overview and description of feminist evaluation and gender approaches and is intended for those who are interested in understanding these approaches to evaluation. Setting: Southern Africa. Intervention: A nonprofit that advocates for sex workers safety and the decriminalization of sex work. Research Design: A comparative framework is used to describe feminist evaluation and gender approaches. The evaluation employs qualitative methods that explored the reality of sex work and sex workers through both semi-structured and exploratory questionnaires. The approach was guided by feminist evaluation, gender approaches, and to a lesser extent drew on several other evaluation approaches. Data Collection and Analysis:  Interviews and document reviews were used to collect data and content and thematic analyses were used to analyze data. Findings: Feminist evaluation and gender approaches should be viewed as distinct approaches. Their use should be of interest both to evaluation scholars and to those who design, implement and/or use evaluations. Keywords: feminist evaluation, gender, gender approaches, international development, program evaluatio