Professionalisation of Program Evaluation in Africa: An Imperative for Effectiveness and Accountability for Public Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Program evaluation is an applied science which importance for accountability, efficacy and effectiveness of public policies makes consensus among scientific researchers. So, in developed countries, especially North America’ ones, it is a professional domain with professional associations, standards of practices and development of tools nurturing and improving continuously practices. The goal of this paper is to show that in French speaking African countries, inexistence or bad functioning of a formal frame of exercise and development of the practice impede the evaluation findings to achieve maximum credibility and acceptance. In fact, in most African French-speaking countries like Benin, amateurism is standard gold. Program evaluation in this context is practiced by managers and technocratic civil servants for all sectors who, with their specific experience in their domain, think they were able to judge program in implementation. So, in these conditions of inexistence of formal training in evaluation and standards of practices, the evaluation practice is marked by defects like unrespect of evaluators ‘independence, the glaring conflict of interest, the low rate of evaluation findings utilization, and so one. This result is so evident in Benin because, we know the non-professionalization of a sensitive domain, like education in program evaluation, can lead to disastrous consequences. So, it is urgent that improving evaluation quality and credibility needs a setup of formal framework of practice with qualified trainings, continuous trainings and experiences sharing and to setup standards of practices. The contribution of the most developed program evaluation communities of North America especially those of Canada would bewelcome.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.045 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".