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

since the language being used failed to communicate value in a manner theywere familiar with in the private sector. A collapse of the partnership wasavoided through reframing terminology that enabled them to recognise thevalue of sustained engagement within the framework of their own objectives.As Everts reflected (21/04/08):„It is not just how you do monitoring and evaluation but howyou explain it to people coming from different worlds. Youneed to show in clear terms what a company is going to getout of doing monitoring and evaluation. There has to be ademonstrable benefit for them in non-ambiguous language. Itis so important that Eduvision really understand what we‟redoing and the value of it. We framed the benefits in terms ofincreased company exposure, product feedback, genuinepartnership, increased accountability, showing how it haspotential to change the whole nature and culture of thecompany. Eduvision needs a better product, monitoring andevaluation completes the feedback loop, it is closely related toResearch and Development, it promotes and demonstratesintegrity and is attractive to funders.‟In the light of this, phrases such as „capacity development‟ and„empowerment‟, although staple terminology within the development world,were substituted when communicating value in favour of emphasising„product feedback‟, „research and development‟ and „return on investment‟.6.5.2 Communicating effectivelyOn a related note, initial interactions with ECBP demonstrated that theterminology specific to monitoring and evaluation was also unfamiliar tocertain partners and that this resulted in an exclusive environment. Midwaythrough the initial outlining of methodological approaches to one partner, theproject lead from ECBP interjected with the question, „what do you mean by afocus group?‟ This highlighted the extent to which language used with theobjective of communicating aims and objectives actually marginalised anumber of partners. He went on to say (14/04/08):247