This week saw over 300 participants from Africa, the Americas and India converge on Cotonou, Benin to participate in the 5th edition of the Benin Evaluation Week. Participants included evaluation practitioners, researchers, specialists and professionals from the evaluation of public administration, institutions of the Republic of Benin, communities, local authorities, universities, professional organisations and civil society organisations.
Focusing on the theme, ‘Evaluation to Promote a Development Administration‘ the workshops, roundtables and presentations were an opportunity for sharing and learning on diverse topics such as;
- Evidence and the decision-making process
- Promotion of the culture of monitoring and evaluation in the management of development processes
- Evaluation as a tool for improving the quality of public services provided to the population
- Systematisation of evaluative practice, and
- Managing evaluations
While the participants recommended that the Beninese law on evaluation continues to be drafted and adopted, they also gave support to;
- Adoption of tools to track the use of evaluation findings within government
- Promoting and building the recently released evaluation database
- Strengthening collaboration with networks in academia, civil society and other peer-learning mechanisms such as Twende Meble
- Strenthening training of evaluation practitioners
- Systematisation of a human rights-based and gender-sensitive evaluation approach and methods of data collection and analysis, and
- Development of a Directory of Indicators by the Public Policies Evaluation and Government Action Analysis Office to feed the analysis variables of public programs and to make their rigorous evaluation easier.