Evidence from research and evaluation needs to be used if it is going to contribute to social improvement. Too often we focus on the methods and the study itself and forget about use until the very end. Use needs to be thought about from the beginning. This focus was reinforced by a study I did for the International Development Research Centre in which we looked at how the research the Centre supports influences public policy – Knowledge to Policy. The findings of that study on the mechanisms of influence has been an important influence on my work over the past decade. I was involved for some years with the Knowledge Sector Initiative in Indonesia where we worked across the policy system to strengthen both supply and demand for policy evidence and its use, as well as working on the legislative and regulatory barriers that inhibit the effective conduct and use of evidence in policy processes. I worked with the Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators program of the International Food Policy Research Institute on a project to enhance the use of evidence gathered through this program, particularly at the national level. Currently I am working with colleagues on research on ‘pathways to the uptake of research’, for Elrha, a humanitarian research agency in the UK. I am also working with colleagues at Witwatersrand University and UNESCO on a proposal for a project that brings futures thinking to evaluation.

Many organizations struggle to develop effective and use-oriented evaluation systems that help the organization learn and improve. While at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) I was involved in the design of evaluation systems and processes that helped the organization and its programs learn from experience. I designed and implemented the first several rounds of program review at the Centre, worked with a cross Centre team to revise our project completion reporting process, and worked with programs on building evaluation of their strategies. Since leaving IDRC, I have worked with the MasterCard Foundation providing support on their evaluation system and I worked with a team to support the development of an evaluation and learning system at the Rideau Hall Foundation in Canada. At the systems level, I am exploring how evaluation can look at more than an organization or a program and take account of whole system change. I have written on this in a working paper published by the Knowledge Sector Initiative and intend to develop further work in this area. I am currently working with the International Confederation of Midwives on building an organisation-wide evaluation and learning system.

I am actively involved in evaluations as well. While at IDRC I was involved in a wide range of evaluations. More recently I have been involved in organizational assessment of UNWomen (regional architecture) in collaboration with EnCompass, and at the Rideau Hall Foundation, with Cindy Weeks Consulting. With Global Affairs Canada, I integrated a Principles-Focused approach to a country program evaluation which GAC has reused in other country program evaluations. I am supporting Sambodhi Research and Communications with two evaluations of maternal and child health programs in India. I support itad in the evaluation of the Global Challenges Research Fund.

Evaluation should leave behind improved capacity to do evaluation. For many years, I conducted training around the world in organizational assessment and Outcome Mapping. More recently I have been working with the UNESCO Regional Office for Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean, on a Massive Online Open Course on “Inequities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Research and policy for social transformations”, delivering three modules on evaluation. The course was piloted in 2017 and is running in both Spanish and English in 2018. I published a chapter in the June 2017 issue of New Directions for Evaluation, ‘Building Evaluation Capacity to Address Problems of Equity.’ I am working with colleagues on thinking through how to address issues of culture in evaluation and how to promote a more active integration of culture into evaluation thinking and methods. I continue to deliver Outcome Mapping Workshops periodically, among others for the Higher Education department of the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education in Indonesia, and to the Atlantic team of the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch (FNIHB) of Indigenous Services Canada. Over the past three years (2018-2020), I have provided evaluation capacity support to projects of the Ontario Brain Institute.