ENAP’s PIFED Training Helps Women Evaluators from Côte d'Ivoire Improve Lives and Grow Professionally

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EVALWOMEN Cote d'Ivoire
Each year ENAP organizes an evaluation training program called Programme international de formation en évaluation du développement (PIFED) in Canada. Last year, six women from EVALWOMEN, a professional women's M&E network in Côte d'Ivoire, received scholarships to attend.  
news
10 Março 2023

Each year, GEI Implementing Partner, l’École nationale d’administration publique (ENAP), organizes an evaluation training program called Programme international de formation en évaluation du développement (PIFED) in Quebec City, Canada. Last year, six women from EVALWOMEN, a professional women's monitoring and evaluation network in Côte d'Ivoire, received scholarships** to attend PIFED.  

Today, these women are working to improve the lives of citizens in Côte d'Ivoire and to bring about positive changes in their communities and professional environments. EVALWOMEN President, Cynthia Hermance Koffi, who was part of the group that completed PIFED in 2022 in Quebec, says PIFED helped them enhance their understanding of the theory of change.  

"Before this training, these women could not distinguish between the theory of change, the logic model and the results chains. Now they understand that the result chains integrated into the logic model form the basis for the development of the theory of change,” she says.  

As a result, the participants are now able to understand the conditions under which change actually occurs within a development intervention, providing a stronger basis for analyzing and evaluating said interventions. Recently, Cynthia Hermance Koffi was involved in a national consultancy evaluating gender mainstreaming in public procurement contracts. She is also currently providing expertise to a Ministry of Education project, acting as a Child Protection and Gender Specialist. "The deeper understanding of the theory of change I now possess gives me a more acute sense of the evaluation process," she says.   

She also emphasizes that the PIFED training allowed participants to develop know-how in planning and designing quality evaluations in a development context leading to evaluations with more potential to be useful for decision-making. This was the case in particular for EVALWOMEN members who have been involved in a project supporting the social reintegration of women inmates from Abidjan correctional facility and penitentiary MACA (Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction d'Abidjan).  

For others, PIFED was a starting point towards more autonomy and responsibility in monitoring and evaluation. This is the case of Bérengère Prisca Ballou. Her supervisors at the Ministry of Agriculture encouraged her to pursue a master’s degree in program evaluation. At the end of her graduate studies, she will be in charge of monitoring and evaluating existing projects within her department.  

Another EVALWOMEN member who participated in the 2022 PIFED training was also given more responsibilities to ensure better functioning of a monitoring and evaluation sub-directorate within a central ministry in Côte d'Ivoire following the approval of the new law (2022) on the evaluation of public policies in this West African country.  

The journey of these women is a source of inspiration for other members of EVALWOMEN. For example, Byba Gobli, who wants to make a career in monitoring and evaluation and to apply for a PIFED 2023 scholarship shared that, "Our nation needs female expertise in this field. Finally, a window of opportunity has opened for me after several years of research. Being an expert in monitoring and evaluation finally seems like a dream that can come true.”  

** The scholarships offered to these women were made possible thanks to the financial support of Global Affairs Canada