Evaluation helps researchers create greater benefits for people and the causes they serve by providing evidence of how and why initiatives work or fail. IDRC supports evaluation and evaluative thinking both internally and with project partners to inform learning and accountability.

 

Responsibility for conducting and using evaluation is shared at IDRC. Senior management actively promotes a culture of learning, creating incentives for evaluation, and learning from failures and disappointing results. It allots resources for evaluation and incorporates evaluation findings into its decision-making.

 

Program staff and project partners engage in and support high-quality, use-oriented evaluations. They seek opportunities to build their evaluation capacities, think evaluatively, and develop evaluation approaches and methods relevant to development research.

 

At IDRC’s Evaluation Unit, we connect the people we serve. We support IDRC management, program staff, and project partners to assume their evaluation roles. We also forge links between IDRC, our project partners, and international evaluation practitioners and theorists.

 

By working in this way, the Evaluation Unit balances our internal service role with our contributions to evaluation practice internationally. We serve IDRC program staff by strengthening their capacity to lead high-quality evaluations. This role is reinforced by our work on evaluation methodologies. Working with developing-country researchers and evaluators keeps our work grounded in the challenges of conducting and using evaluation in the real world.