“In this Centre for Development Impact seminar, Richard Longhurst (IDS) and Sarah Mistry (BOND) will highlight the importance of evaluability assessments for development projects, as well as discussing the suitability of various evaluation methods that are available to a manager.
Evaluability is a technical term not often used outside the evaluation community: of several definitions, it can be described as: ‘”the feasibility of an evaluation is assessed … it should be determined whether or not the development intervention is adequately defined and its results verifiable, and if the evaluation is the best way to answer questions posed by policy makers or stakeholders” (OECD-DAC). It is mostly a project (or programme or intervention) design issue in so far as evaluation is better incorporated into the early design stage. An assessment of evaluability should lead to a more logical choice of evaluation methods. Integral to what looks like a technical exercise, there are many important and sometimes contentious management and stakeholder issues.”