Evaluating ICT for Education in Africa - Royal Holloway, University of ...

partnership in Ethiopia was that the tumultuous political contextsurrounding the programme meant that several of the monitoring andevaluation methods that had been designed could not be implemented intheir entirety. In the light of this, at the end of the involvement of theresearch team in the programme, all of the methods that had been designedbut not implemented were passed to ECBP ownership so that they could be ofmaximum benefit in future iterations of any monitoring and evaluationprocess. It was demoralising that the delay in deployment caused by thegovernment meant that not all the methods could be utilised within theprogramme timeframe, as explained in Chapter 3, but investing heavily in thecapacity enhancement process meant that the methods may still be of somefuture use.5.4.3 Realities of participationThere is widespread criticism of externally imposed monitoring andevaluation, with pragmatic realisation that a more appropriate approachmust be possible (Horton and Mackay 1999). Participatory methods havebeen promoted as part of the alternative in development work generally(Chambers 1994) and also specifically within the monitoring and evaluationof education programmes (King 1995). Despite this, there is evidence thatrecent prominent ICT for education related evaluations have been neitherparticipatory nor culturally specific (Kozma et al. 2003, Kozma et al. 2004),often resorting to reductionist national data sets that marginalise localdistinctives (Selinger 2009). Indeed, despite calls for an alternative, thebenefits of participation are still viewed sceptically within sectors of theinternational donor community, with a World Bank report emphasising that„talking to program participants can be valuable, but it is unlikely to provide acredible evaluation on its own‟ (Ravallion 1999 p 7).It is also possible that increased stakeholder participation can becomeassumed as a simplistic methodological prerequisite for more effectivemonitoring and evaluation, becoming something of a buzzword withinaccepted development parlance (Tacchi et al. 2009b, Kothari 2005). Whilst192