A leading M&E, Gender, Program and Organizational Management Specialist, with over 10 years of relevant experience. Member of UNFCCC's Team of Technical Experts (TTEs) under the international consultation and analysis (ICA) process, on Climate Change. Founder of Evaluation Society of Kenya (ESK). With her coordination, Kericho’s Health Sector Rapid Evaluation was Runners-Up in the 2022 IDEAS/GEI Global Award, under ‘Evaluation as Transformation’ category. It’s a joint initiative of ESK/MED, National Treasury and Planning, endorsed by the Council of Governors (COG), funded by the World Bank, towards promotion of the evaluation of the SDGs (under the EvalSDGs agenda). Runners-up recipient of the Africa Evidence Leadership Award. Recognized by Nation Media Business Daily as one of Kenya’s 2016 “Women in Top Corporate Leadership. Under her organizational leadership Kenya declared the 2018 Winner of the “EVALPARTNERS/EVALSDGs Global Outcomes Competition. Holds MA in Gender and Development; BA in Sociology and Philosophy. Education supplemented with formal professional trainings in M&E, policy, advocacy, climate change and gender, among others.
My contributions
In the latest EvalForward Talks session, I had the opportunity to share my experience on communicating difficult evaluation findings, drawing from the rapid evaluation I am managing on the assessment of service delivery of the health and water sector projects in Kericho & Kilifi Counties.
One of the objectives of this evaluation is to identify lessons for technical officers and policymakers to improve service delivery. For this to happen, however, there definitely needs to be a certain degree of trust in the evaluation and confidence in the whole process.
The context of this project evaluation is that of decentralized levels
This year's theme was: “Towards Realization of the Big Four Agenda: Evidence-based Decision Making for Sustainable Development”, the “Big Four” being the current national priority sectors: Food and Nutrition, Universal Health Coverage, Affordable Housing and Manufacturing.
Coming against a backdrop of great developmental opportunities and challenges, with Kenya being the largest and most diversified economy in Eastern Africa, the Evaluation Week raised a call for more focus on the use of evidence.
One of the objectives of the M&E Week was to “review and share practical approaches to enhance use of M&E findings in policy and programme implementation”
Jennifer Nzambi Mutua
Founder and independent consultant Evaluation Society of KenyaDear Malika,
Thanks for sharing your experience. Our initiative as shared on this platform [www.evalforward.org/comment/reply/node/118/field_comments_ref/19], involves a joint partnership of the Evaluation Society of Kenya (ESK) and Monitoring & Evaluation Department (MED), funded by the World Bank. So our context is different from yours, as it involves coordination between national and county governments (making things more complex). Nonetheless, like you, our experiences were that indeed the rapid evaluations were not as quick as initially planned (and as the term seems to imply). Much more resources than initially planned were also expended. Some contributing factors to these were:
In view of all these and subject to context, I think, it’s important to take into account these limitations, including potential budget over-runs at the evaluation planning stages.
Kind Regards,
Jennifer