Evaluation
There is now evidence of emerging country-led demands for evaluation in Africa. From both the public and private sector to ensure accountability in their programs and how they are impacting on Africa’s real economy.
Evaluation services offered by ADRES helps clients understand change, both in anticipated and unanticipated, and plan for what happens next. ADRES does this by establishing why the level of performance is being achieved, what difference is being made, what has been learned, and what to do next in the implementation of a policy or program.
We apply evaluation to design, clarify, develop and summarise programs across the African development cycle. We believe good evaluation helps us to deepen our analysis by offering in-depth evidence-based guidance for improving interventions.
We evaluate County Development Plans, National Development Pans and Regional Development Plans..
What We Do
We carefully tailor a wide range of analytical and quantitative tools to enable our clients to design better policies, rigorously test those ideas, and take informed action at scale to improve lives and impact positively on Africa’s real economy. Our services include experimental evaluation methodologies – including, but not limited to, randomized controlled trials – tailored to the priorities of international development decision-makers; monitoring and performance management systems to facilitate continuous data-driven improvement; policy design consulting and scale-up support.
Our advisory teams are closely integrated into client organizations, and we strive to provide comprehensive support for clients who want to maximize their social impact through evidence-based policy-making. Depending on client needs, we:
- Diagnose social challenges in context: Understanding how to address social problems is rarely straightforward. We help managers establish the conceptual foundation to maximize impact by mapping potential theories of change, reviewing existing knowledge, interviewing stakeholders and experts, collecting data from the field, and identifying key programmatic gaps.
- Design potential solutions: Effective interventions are rarely one-size-fits-all, so solutions cannot simply be imported from other countries. We help managers design context-appropriate interventions based on a thorough diagnosis of the challenges, and pressure-testing of potential interventions. We then work with our clients to rigorously evaluate these potential solutions to decide which should be scaled up.
- Rigorously evaluate potential solutions: In complex environments, it is often impossible to say whether a given intervention will be impactful. That is why we help our clients rigorously evaluate potential solutions to help them decide which one (if any) they should scale up. Our impact evaluations are designed to provide rigorous, actionable evidence in time to inform our clients’ decisions. The following characteristics exemplify our approach to using impact evaluation as a practical decision-making tool:
Demand-driven – Evaluation questions are sourced through consultation with our clients, with explicit emphasis on questions with immediate relevance to client operations.
Responsive – We know that governments and NGOs often have deadlines that do not align with the typical research timeline. We focus on generating the most rigorous evidence possible within the decision-making timelines of our clients.
Rigorous – Given how dynamic most developing country contexts are, it can be hard to know if a program created real change. Simply measuring outcomes before and after implementation is usually not good enough – outcomes might have changed even without the program. In order to accurately identify the impact of a program (compared to what would have happened without the program), we use experimental and quasi-experimental methods such as randomized controlled trials, difference-in-difference with matching and regression discontinuity designs. We select evaluation methods to maximize rigor within the operational and implementation constraints of our clients.
Context-specific – We design our studies to be generalizable to the intended area of scale of our client organization, whether that is one district, one state, or an entire country. We are less concerned with whether something that we test in Uganda will also work in India, and focus our efforts instead on helping each individual client scale up the best possible program it can within its geography.
- Provide monitoring and evaluation advisory services: A rigorous impact evaluation is not always the optimal learning tool for a particular stage of a program or organization. We help organizations determine what types of monitoring and evaluation activities will best serve their organizational learning needs and help them integrate these into their operations.
- Operationalize scale-up of high-impact interventions: Social change requires more than reports. We work hand-in-hand with clients to implement at-scale the interventions found to be high-impact by our rigorous evaluations.
As a client-service organization, we make the most rigorous impact measurement tools practical for managers while maintaining the highest ethical and professional standards.