Participatory research!

Wow - read this presentation of participatory research by 16-24-year-old girls and young women in Kinshasa. An exciting piece of work supported by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and Social Development Direct (SDD). The initiative turns the "objects" of research into researchers. I trust it will yield much richer information than what you would get from a "top-down" externally-designed survey on young women in Kinshasa. And the young people who collect and analyse the information will gather skills, knowledge and strength in the process! I would expect their interviewees to benefit from the process, too.

Governments which fund development want to see "evidence-based" approaches, that is, research needs to be built into development. Fortunately, the widespread misconception that only large-scale quantitative surveys and experiments yield reliable evidence appears to be fading.

Good things happen in the short term and bad things happen in the long term

This is a long title but I love that sentence, culled from Elliot Stern’s intervention on the Benefits and Barriers to Evaluation Use at the recent evaluation conference in Paris. The one-day conference, convened jointly by the European Evaluation Society, France’s evaluation society, the United Nations Organisation for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), took place at the quite extraordinary UNESCO headquarters in Paris.