Utilization Focused Evaluation
Evaluation is about structured collection of information about activities, characteristics, and outcomes of policies, programs, strategic actions for use by specific people to reduce uncertainties, improve effectiveness, and make decisions with regard to what is being done and how different stakeholders are affected. Utilization focused evaluation begins with the premise that evaluations should be judged by their utility and actual use.
The focus in utilization focused evaluation is on intended use by intended users. How evaluations are used affects the spending of billions of money to fight the problems of poverty, disease, ignorance, joblessness, crime,
hunger, and inequality. This course discusses principles, methodology, and ways of judging outcomes of evaluations.
Policy and program designers and implementers, monitoring and evaluation practitioners and consultants and monitoring and evaluation trainers.
At the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Distinguish between ordinary evaluations and utilization focused evaluations;
- Explain the principles; methodologies and tools of utilization focused evaluations;
- Appreciate the various complementary methods of evaluation data collection, data analysis and interpretation;
- Acquire skills of writing an evaluation report;
- Examine the quality and utility of an evaluation report;
- Appreciate various countries evaluation experiences.