Date: August 21-2, 2009
Venue: Claremont Graduate University, Southern California

Professional Development Workshop Series

Claremont Graduate University is proud to offer our annual line-up of acclaimed workshops for professionals, academics, and students who seek to hone their research and evaluation skills.  Presenters from across North America will gather in beautiful Claremont, California, to teach participants from academia, research institutes and think tanks, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, and the public sector.  As always, this year’s series offers several new workshops as well as long-standing favorites.

Each workshop lasts one full day.  Workshops in this series have consistently sold out in previous years, so save your seat in the workshops of your choice by registering online today.

We will be offering one workshop each day via live webcast in a state-of-the-art virtual classroom environment. The virtual classroom offerings will include interaction with the live presenter and participants. Anyone with a high-speed internet connection, computer speakers and a microphone is able to participate. Use of a webcam is encouraged for maximum interaction.

Follow this link to register for the online versions of our workshops!

The live webcast offerings will include:

• Friday, August 21:Basics of Evaluation & Applied Research Methods (Donaldson & Christie)
• Saturday, August 22: Practical Program Evaluation: A Program Theory Approach (Chen & Donaldson)
• Sunday, August 23: Utilization-Focused Evaluation (Patton)
• Monday, August 24: Empowerment Evaluation (Fetterman)
• Tuesday, August 25: Meta-Evaluation: A Checklist Approach (Scriven)
• Wednesday, August 26:Using Technology to Enhance Applied Research and Evaluation (Donaldson & Azzam)

Progress of the World’s Women 2008/2009. Full Report. Published by United Nations Development Fund for Women.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Progress of the World’s Women 2008/2009: Who Answers to Women? Gender and Accountability shows that realising women’s rights and achieving the Millennium Development Goals depends on strengthening accountability for commitments to women and gender equal-ity. The examples highlighted throughout the Report suggest that for women’s rights to translate into substantive improvements in their lives, and for gender equality to be realized in practice, women must be able to fully participate in public decision-making at all levels and hold those responsible to account when their rights are infringed or their needs ignored. Published at the halfway point to the 2015 dead-line for achieving the MDGs, Progress presents clear evidence that women’s empowerment and gender equality are drivers for reducing poverty, building food security, reducing maternal mortality, and enhancing the effectiveness of aid.

The chapters in this volume examine how women’s efforts to ex-pose gender-based injustice and demand redress have changed the ways in which we think about accountability. Acknowledging that different groups of women encounter distinct challenges in gaining access to their rights, Progress 2008/2009 highlights a wide range of examples, including those that show how the most excluded women are identifying accountability gaps and calling for redress.

Improving accountability to women begins with increasing the numbers of women in decision-making, but it cannot stop there. It requires stronger mandates, clearer performance indicators, better incentives and sustained advocacy efforts – in short, good governance. Progress 2008/2009 shows that good governance needs women and women need good governance if commitments to gender equality are to be met nationally and globally

“Does Empowerment Work?: Underlying concepts and the experience of two community empowerment programs in Cambodia and Tanzania ” (2008), by Aldo Benini.

This book length document “investigates the effectiveness in poor rural societies of a concept of modernity that has enjoyed an explosive career over the past fifty years – empowerment. From rich-nation self-help movements to the liberation of historically oppressed groups, programs claiming to give power to the powerless are legion. Often they are mixed with other normative master frames and social technologies such as human rights or micro-finance.

This study traces the origins, growth and underlying assumptions of the empowerment philosophy. It gives a detailed analysis of the structures, processes and outcomes of two large programs affiliated with the Lutheran World Federation. Consonant with the Federation’s Global Strategy, the Cambodia and Tanzania programs pursue empowerment, rights-based and integrated approaches on an equal footing. This offers rich opportunities to observe synergies and contradictions among those strategies and with their ambient societies.

Does empowerment work? Yes, at least to the extent that the observed programs have carried out, in poor rural communities and among some of their poorest households, an initial mobilization focused on self-assertive and planned improvements. Will it persist in global development discourse? This is more doubtful. “Empowerment” as a concept is so rich in meanings that it always depends on additional selections using other master frames. Moreover, it has not risen to a normative regime (as human rights have). Empowerment’s survival depends on able ideational brokers, but it remains relevant in response to enduring poverty and exclusion that keep issues of wealth and power burning.”