Connecting and learning from conducting evaluations during Covid-19 crisis

The online round table will focus on sharing concrete experiences and extracting lessons learned from conducting country-wide evaluations in a virtual environment (in Romania).

Currently QURES Quality Research and Support has under implementation for the Romanian Ministry of European Funds 5 evaluation projects, i.e. Evaluation of the Operational Programme Human Capital 2007-2013 and 2014-2020 – employment-related interventions, Evaluation of the Operational Programme Technical Assistance 2014-2020, Evaluation of Partnership, Beneficiaries Capacity, Institutional Capacity in the framework of EU-funded programmes in Romania, Evaluation of the EU-funded Performance Framework in Romania. For UNICEF Romania we implement the Ex-post evaluation of the Quality Inclusive Education Modelling project 2015-2019. In total more than 20 evaluations are under implementation in the framework of these contracts and at least 20 other evaluations are implemented under different other contracts managed by the Ministry of European Funds.

We have started to explore different options and apps for carrying out interviews and focus groups as in most cases the fieldwork has recently started. After two weeks there are already signs of a “phone interview fatigue”. And the real challenge will be to organize focus groups and expert panels. Face-to-face surveys, planned for difficult groups of respondents, need to be switched to CAPI and it is uncertain if the expected response rate will be reached.

The session will put together the supply and demand side of evaluation in Romania and will facilitate exchange of first hand, recent experiences with data collection carried out in such times. In a first part, the discussion will be organized by application/virtual platform or other modalities used for data collection. Experiences will be presented and discussed. Advantages and disadvantages will be distilled and passed to the other participants. In a second part the discussion will focus on different instruments (e.g. interviews, focus groups), the best tools used for each instrument and recommendations for the future, i.e. how to improve the data collection process and its results.

The key points and recommendations of the online seminar will be recorded in a written “kit”, in Romanian and English, to be distributed to evaluation experts all over the globe.