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Project

Developing Evaluation and Communication Capacity in Information Society Research (DECI-2)
 

Central Asia
South Asia
Far East Asia
South America
Project ID
107064
Total Funding
CAD 731,649.00
IDRC Officer
Matthew Smith
Project Status
Completed
End Date
Duration
48 months

Programs and partnerships

Networked Economies

Lead institution(s)

Summary

One of IDRC's main goals is ensuring that high-quality research contributes to change in policy and practice. Meeting that objective can be challenging, given the complex interactions among stakeholders, researchers, and communicators.Read more

One of IDRC's main goals is ensuring that high-quality research contributes to change in policy and practice. Meeting that objective can be challenging, given the complex interactions among stakeholders, researchers, and communicators. Evaluation and communication are essential to ensuring that research has an impact. The two fields share common elements: the importance of engaging users from the beginning, the significance of pretesting data collection tools and communication materials, and the notion of users taking ownership of evaluation and communication activities and outcomes. Building on earlier research, this project focuses on new methodologies for evaluation and communication, and will provide mentorship support and capacity building in these methodologies for Information and Networks researchers across the Global South. It will result in a trained cadre of regional mentors who are able to facilitate advanced methodologies in both evaluation and communications. Participating flagship project teams will develop their evaluation and communication skills, and gain opportunities for policy and practice change. More will be learned about practical issues involved in implementing and combining the new evaluation and communications methodologies. Communication products will also be developed to share these practical lessons with practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.

Research outputs

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Report
Language:

English

Summary

Teams from the Developing Evaluation and Communication Capacity in Information Society Research (DECI-2) met in a one-off event to present findings in relation to DECI-2 project objectives: capacity development outcomes, partner/project level changes, and production of a learning and dissemination review. The workshop meeting was an opportunity to reflect and find ways to improve and consolidate work during the last year of the project, strengthen mentoring, simplify the DECI-2 approach, and plan strategically for knowledge sharing.

Author(s)
Ramirez, Ricardo
Report
Language:

English

Summary

This report contributes workshop findings on readiness for building an evaluation culture: At the heart of evaluation work is learning-by-doing, or experiential learning; when evaluation users are engaged in deciding what to evaluate, what questions to ask, what evidence to seek, and what tools to use to collect and analyze findings, they learn about evaluation and take ownership of the results. “Readiness” is a term used for describing the enabling and limiting factors behind collaboration.

Author(s)
Zaveri, Sonal
Training Materials
Language:

English

Summary

This poster introduces the Utilization Focused Evaluation (UFE) process, which invites users to consider a wide learning agenda, not just accountability or impacts. Engaging stakeholders early for "audience research" can shape project priorities and evaluation uses. Key Evaluation Questions on communication outcomes can yield findings that feed into communication practices.

Author(s)
Zaveri, Sonal
Study
Language:

English

Summary

This DECI-2 (Developing Evaluation and Communication Capacity in Information Society Research) case study reviews mentorship provided to the research team at EAFIT University, focusing on strategies for better communication of research findings to policy-makers and funders. EAFIT’s I+D Unit objective is to identify good practices for adoption of ICTs in schools while developing models for transferring and scaling-up such practices. EAFIT followed the Utilization-Focused Evaluation (U-FE) approach to evaluate two components of a project already in process. U-FE allowed EAFIT’s evaluation team to identify information gaps and consider new ways of using findings. Special attention was given to process documentation.

Author(s)
Navas, Joaquin
Paper
Language:

English

Summary

This series of case studies emerged from an action-research project entitled Developing Evaluation and Communication Capacity in Information Society Research (DECI-2). The predecessor DECI-1 project focused only on evaluation mentoring in Asia. The subsequent DECI-2 project collaborated with research networks and grantees supported by International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Information & Networks Program between July 2012 and 2017. This particular case summarizes work with the ISIF grants program based at APNIC in Brisbane, Australia.

Author(s)
Zaveri, Sonal
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