Building Equitable Evaluations: Rethinking Power, Evidence & Development in Africa

By Akah Thelma Eni

From 24–28 November 2025, the African School of Evaluation (ASE) brought together practitioners, policymakers, and development actors in Accra for an intensive five-day training on an approach that is reshaping how monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are designed, implemented, interpreted, and used across Africa. The African School of Evaluation (ASE) was nothing short of inspiring. It wasn’t your typical “sit down and take notes” session. Instead, it was a warm welcome into a movement and a reminder that evaluation, when done right, is not just numbers, but people, stories, realities, and identity.

The big idea? Africa must evaluate Africa. For too long, the continent has borrowed frameworks from the Global North. Some worked, many didn’t, and almost all lacked the African soul. ASE came with a mission: to honor African knowledge, values, culture, history, and lived realities.

Everything flowed with the spirit of Ubuntu “I am because you are.” Evaluation must be rooted in community, dignity, and lived experience. It was about building strong, credible systems that are useful, ethical, timely, and community owned.

As the first cohort, we were pioneers setting the path for others to follow. The modules we explored included:

• Mixed Methods in Action: Quantitative and Qualitative Essentials for Field Evaluators
• Designing and running a monitoring and evaluation system in the age of Artificial intelligence in public administration
• Evaluation in Service of Equity: Approaches and methods for equitable evaluation
• Children-Focused Evaluation
• Impact Evaluation Techniques: Theory and Applications  

It was clear we are not just learning evaluation; we are shaping Africa’s future of evidence, learning, and leadership.

I was privileged to attend the module on “Evaluation in Service of Equity: Approaches and methods for equitable evaluation” and the central question guiding the training was bold but essential:

How can evaluation become a tool for social justice rather than just accountability?

Traditional evaluation often focuses on whether a project met its objectives or delivered measurable results. Equitable Evaluation (EE), however, asks deeper questions: For whom did it work? Under what conditions? And what systemic barriers shaped these outcomes? It emphasizes the differences between equality, equity, and justice. For example, two students applying for the same scholarship may appear to have equal access, but differences in geography, gender norms, socioeconomic background, and local infrastructure can create inequitable starting points. EE seeks to uncover and address these structural layers rather than merely reporting averages.

The training highlighted major gaps in mainstream evaluation. Conventional M&E can be dominated by the “colonial gaze,” focusing more on donor priorities than community needs. Western definitions of development GDP, efficiency, and market reforms often overlook local concepts of well-being such as dignity, land security, and belonging. Historical and systemic factors like colonial legacies, climate injustice, structural racism, and gendered power relations are too often ignored. Over-reliance on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) can strip away local context, ignore complex social realities, and reinforce Global North worldviews.

To address these gaps, ASE introduced frameworks that center equity, human rights, and African perspectives:

• Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE): Anchored in African knowledge systems and worldviews, MAE emphasizes decolonizing narratives, reclaiming indigenous epistemologies, and elevating African intellectual leadership.
• Transformative Evaluation: A value-driven approach that focuses on human rights, amplifies marginalized voices, exposes power imbalances, and seeks structural change rather than cosmetic reporting.
• Human Rights-Based Evaluation (HRBA): Guided by Participation, Accountability, Non-discrimination, Empowerment, and Legality (PANEL principles).
• Gender Transformative Evaluation: Moves beyond counting women to challenging gendered power dynamics.
• Decolonial and Indigenous Approaches: Prioritizes community ownership, relationality, and culturally safe knowledge production.

The course also explored practical methods for equitable data collection, including Most Significant Change, Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA), semi-structured interviews, outcome harvesting, and mixed-method approaches. These tools help shift power from evaluators to communities and capture complex realities that numbers alone cannot.

Toward Equitable Development in Africa

A key highlight of the training was the Transformative Equity Criterion (TEC), a framework that encourages evaluators to ask:

1. Who benefits or is excluded?
2. What systemic forces drive inequity?
3. How does geography or location shape outcomes?
4. Whose values guide the intervention?
5. How does history shape present inequities?
   
   

Alongside TEC, Key Evaluation Questions help steer evaluation toward justice oriented outcomes. Instead of asking, “Did the program achieve its objectives?”, evaluators now ask: “For whom did it work, for whom did it fail, and why?” This perspective ensures evaluations are not only accountable to donors but also downward to the communities they serve.

The training concluded with a call to action for all actors in the evaluation ecosystem:

• Funders must shift from compliance to learning, support long-term systemic evaluations, and prioritize equity focused questions.
• Evaluators must decolonize methods, challenge bias and positionality, apply intersectional analysis, elevate indigenous knowledge, and co-create with communities.
• Communities must take ownership of the evaluation process, define success on their own terms, and hold institutions accountable. 

Equitable Evaluation is more than a methodology it is a transformative mindset, a rebalancing of power, and a commitment to justice. By centering African knowledge, lived experience, and local solutions, this approach ensures that evaluation is not just a mirror of deficits, but a tool for dignity, social justice, and meaningful transformation.

Through initiatives like ASE’s training, Africa is not waiting for external solutions it is building evaluation systems by us, for us, ensuring development that is equitable, inclusive, and locally owned.

At eBASE, we use “Tori Dey”, a method deeply rooted in African ways of knowing and sharing, as part of our evaluation and dissemination processes. True to its Made in Africa philosophy, Tori Dey goes beyond numbers and reports as it centers stories, experiences, and community voices to capture real-world impact. The approach blends evaluation with dialogue, reflection, and storytelling, ensuring that findings are accessible, culturally relevant, and actionable. By embracing local knowledge systems and participatory methods, Tori Dey transforms evaluation from a technical exercise into a community owned learning process, enabling insights to directly inform development decisions and drive meaningful change across African contexts.