How can evaluative knowledge contribute to addressing health inequities? Approaches to evaluation capacity building that takes inequities seriously

Questions probed in this session include: How do we train evaluators and planners to be responsive to the realities of widespread inequiies? How do we train evaluators to measure the value added of interventions given the complexity, inequities, and heterogeneities of the social landscape in which interventions are implemented? How do we train evaluators to incorporate contextual realities in applying evaluation criteria to judge the success of interventions?

Evaluation is at a crossroads, given both the need for decolonized knowledge as well as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement. The need for approaches of ‘valuing’ that incorporates issues of diversity and equity has never been greater. There is a need to be humble about our evaluation frameworks and learn from a diversity of settings including learning from evaluation capacity-building experiences from countries such as India.

There is a recognition that there are limits to what can be achieved through narrow programs and that there is a need to intervene at the system and policy levels. This also means that the evaluation community needs to be responsive to recognizing what it takes to build policy evaluation capacities
A country with a diversity of India, with 32 States and Union Territories and 22 Official languages, provides remarkable opportunities for scholarship and learning to be responsive to the needs of evidence to address inequities in the Indian ecosystem. This panel also leverages recent experiences in India by the Development Monitoring Evaluation Office (DMEO; this is the apex body of evaluation of the Central Government of India; DMEO's mission is to “institutionalize application and use of monitoring and evaluation at all levels of government policy and programs and help improve the efficiency, effectiveness, equity, sustainability, and achievement of results.”) and the Government of Meghalaya to build evaluation capacities to address inequities in India. In keeping with the Global theme, the session will be moderated by an evaluator based in the US State of Hawaii (formerly based in India)) and the discussant will be from Japan (also formerly based in India)

Learnings from this panel will include:
(1) learning from the experiences of the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) in India in building evaluation capacities to address inequities both at the National and State levels in India.
(2) In a number of evaluation capacity-building projects and research articles, there is still a tendency to think about building capacities as an activity or an event. This panel will argue that capacity building needs to be conceptualized as a dynamic process that requires relationships between multiple actors. Embedding a culture of evaluation requires us to think through a dynamic process of enhancing/building such a culture. The dynamics of building such a culture are aided by feedback from a system of monitoring and evaluation. This is relevant under an Indian cooperative federalism because it suggests that there is value in thinking about multilevel coordination between the Center and the States as we build evaluation capacity in India.
(3) Our interest is in how a program of work around policy evaluation capacity building can incorporate inequities more explicitly in the training and building capacities of evaluators.
(4) The panel will pay attention to learning from different contexts, learning across multiple levels, and paying attention to processes that exacerbate inequities.
(5) The realities of the pandemic in exacerbating inequities, and the utility of evaluation itself as an intervention in reducing inequities will also be discussed.