South-South Collaborative efforts to shift power in evaluations- an Equity Centred Evaluation

The panel will explore the value of having South-South collaborations using examples of efforts developed in South Asia and in collaboration with partners from Asia Pacific, Latin America and Africa. GENSA and PRAXIS have extensive experience in providing a culture aware, innovative, participatory and equity focused evaluation approach that has been developed through years of praxis, using grounded theory approaches with a focus on social transformation.

Power dynamics are not JUST about the Global North and Global South but they co-exist in the Global South itself. What approaches can we use and offer to young emerging evaluators that resonate with our lived realities? What are our challenges and opportunities to develop a ‘localized, transformative evaluation approach, methodology and tools.’ Using concrete examples, GENSA and PRAXIS will deconstruct the multiple understandings of “equity in evaluation” and discuss concrete ways to go forward. We believe that unless we analyze systematically who is excluded in the evaluation process, and how this exclusion happens at different levels, we, in the Global South cannot claim to have changed the paradigm or advocate for a different more equitable global evaluation ecosystem. We will explore how injustices are –proactively or subtly– reinforced by institutional day-to-day decisions regarding how evaluations are designed, funded, commissioned, implemented, and disseminated. We will also explore specific levels of responsibility that need to be taken into consideration to radically transform the evaluation industry first in our backyard and then across the Global South and globally. These efforts have to be collaborative and we will discuss some of the promising pathways available.

This panel will share excerpts from the South Asian narratives on the inequity perpetuated in north-south collaborative evaluations which mirror a deep structural and colonial inequity.