Given Hapunda

5 Because many African countries and organisations working in Africa are donor-dependent, evaluation of their policies, programmes and or projects is part of the conditions attached to the donor funds. Due to lack of skilled evaluation practitioners and consultants to conduct programme or project evaluations, services are often outsourced from developing countries. Their etic evaluation tends to diffuse local contexts with their outside political and socio-economic lens to understand the worth or value of policies, programmes and projects implemented in Africa. The danger of these etic lenses is that they misrepresent evaluation findings. Connected to this challenge is the problem of practicing M&E as a profession. Africa has a pool of people who call themselves experts without any formal training. Limited number of training institutions that offer M&E in Africa make it difficult to improve the profession. In addition, lack of and sometimes weak M&E associations make it hard to control and monitor the practitioners. The weak prevailing pool of M&E professional practitioners has contributed to sub-standard and half-baked monitoring and evaluation outputs. Yet, as Stufflebeam & Coryn (2014) put it, M&E is a distinct profession and supports all other professionals and in turn, it is supported by many of them arguing, that in fact no professional would excel without M&E. As highlighted earlier, M&E, unlike other disciplines is still young, therefore, it lacks home-grown teaching and learning materials including academics to develop it. This means African universities have no ability and commitment to introduce M&E courses to address the problems of capacities. While some universities in Africa especially in South Africa and West Africa have graduate and postgraduate programmes in M&E, majority have short courses in M&E or nothing at all. This limited participation of universities in advancing the field is also a bottleneck for home- grown evaluation journals. Efforts to address some of these problems have been made by governments and cooperating partners through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCED) evaluating country programmes (ECPs) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Government sector evaluation needs assessments (see OCED, 1999 and UNICEF, 2016).The recommendations from such reviews, which include trainings in M&E, establishment of M&E units, strengthening communication between partners, among other good recommendation are also addressed in this handbook. This handbook is an attempt to contribute to the solution of M&E’s challenges faced by African governments, organisations and learning institutions. Although the handbook has a bias toM&E for internationally-driven interventions, its principles apply to all facets of self-led evaluations, including government, organisations (strategies), sector, policy, project and programme evaluation. It is hoped that the principles of this book will allow for optimal utilisation of available resources, sharing of experiences and foster evidence-based reporting.