Learn, communicate, evaluate: The Pelican Network

How can we learn more from what we do? Full report from Maastricht meeting in 2002 on MandE website (Word document, 35 pages 224 KB)

International Development Resource Centre (IDRC) - Evaluation unit

European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM)

Link evaluation with communication about concrete experience and you get a much more accurate picture of what is working – or not working – in development programmes.

Development practitioners are under increasing pressure to show results, be accountable and use new evidence to make programmes more effective. But evaluation often places too much weight on accountability to initial project plans and financial inputs, rather than the need to account for changes in the people involved in a programme and what is effective in their context.

Researchers, communicators, donor agencies and evaluators attended a two-day workshop in Maastricht, The Netherlands, in December 2002 to share up-to-the-minute thinking about how to get more out of evaluation and evidence-based communication.

Participants kept in touch after the workshop, forming an informal network called the Pelican Initative: named after a pelican statue on the roof of the first workshop venue.

A stakeholder meeting in November 2004 saw some of the original participants initiating a new phase of the network supported by the International Development Resource Centre (IDRC) and Exchange, and facilitated by the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM).

In addition to the examples already collected, Southern case studies of effective learning and communication will be fed into an ongoing dialogue, both electronic and face to face, throughout 2005.

Putting emphasis on the learning aspects of evaluation stresses a different kind of accountability – to local organisations, their partners and the communities they work in, as well as to donors and intermediary organisations. And linking evaluation processes to communication between people at all levels of involvement can democratise evaluation and enhance learning and adaptation.

For more information contact Charlotte Carlsson, ECDPM, cc@ecdpm.org or join the online discussion.